Related papers: Learning to grok: Emergence of in-context learning…
Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…
Pretrained large generative language models have shown great performance on many tasks, but exhibit low compositional generalization abilities. Scaling such models has been shown to improve their performance on various NLP tasks even just…
In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…
In-context learning (ICL) is a remarkable capability of pretrained transformers that allows models to generalize to unseen tasks after seeing only a few examples. We investigate empirically the conditions necessary on the pretraining…
Large language models manifest the ability of few-shot adaptation to a sequence of provided examples. This behavior, known as in-context learning, allows for performing nontrivial machine learning tasks during inference only. In this work,…
In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly advanced, their ability to exhibit compositional generalization -- the capacity to combine learned skills in novel ways not encountered during training -- has garnered significant…
Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…
Large transformer-based models are able to perform in-context few-shot learning, without being explicitly trained for it. This observation raises the question: what aspects of the training regime lead to this emergent behavior? Here, we…
In this work, we explore the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks that were not encountered during training. To achieve this, we conduct synthetic experiments where the objective is to learn OOD…
Large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstrations provided at inference time. We study this in-context learning phenomenon through the lens of Gaussian Processes (GPs). We build controlled experiments where models observe…
The transformer's remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) has sparked a wide range of studies designed to understand its strengths and limitations. However, a theoretical understanding of when ICL can and cannot generalize…
The ability to extrapolate from short problem instances to longer ones is an important form of out-of-distribution generalization in reasoning tasks, and is crucial when learning from datasets where longer problem instances are rare. These…
In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters. Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various…
Large language models (LMs) such as GPT-3 have the surprising ability to do in-context learning, where the model learns to do a downstream task simply by conditioning on a prompt consisting of input-output examples. The LM learns from these…
Composing basic skills from simple tasks to accomplish composite tasks is crucial for modern intelligent systems. We investigate the in-context composition ability of language models to perform composite tasks that combine basic skills…
It has recently been demonstrated empirically that in-context learning emerges in transformers when certain distributional properties are present in the training data, but this ability can also diminish upon further training. We provide a…
Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little…
We examine the pre-training dynamics of language models, focusing on their ability to copy text from preceding context--a fundamental skill for various LLM applications, including in-context learning (ICL) and retrieval-augmented generation…
Large language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning, where they learn to solve tasks given a few examples. Recent work has shown that transformers can be trained to perform simple regression tasks in-context. This…