Related papers: Local to Global: Learning Dynamics and Effect of I…
Transformers underpin modern large language models (LLMs) and are commonly assumed to be behaviorally unstructured at random initialization, with all meaningful preferences emerging only through large-scale training. We challenge this…
Some autoregressive models exhibit in-context learning capabilities: being able to learn as an input sequence is processed, without undergoing any parameter changes, and without being explicitly trained to do so. The origins of this…
A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…
Training autonomous agents that can learn new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations is a long-standing problem in machine learning. Recently, transformers have been shown to learn new language or vision tasks without any weight…
Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…
In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are…
Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in language modeling tasks. However, the reasons behind their tremendous success are still unclear. In this paper, towards a better understanding, we train a Transformer model on a…
In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…
Viewing neural network models in terms of their loss landscapes has a long history in the statistical mechanics approach to learning, and in recent years it has received attention within machine learning proper. Among other things, local…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored,…
Learning parameters of latent graphical models (GM) is inherently much harder than that of no-latent ones since the latent variables make the corresponding log-likelihood non-concave. Nevertheless, expectation-maximization schemes are…
We investigate forward signal propagation and gradient back propagation in deep, randomly initialized transformers, yielding simple necessary and sufficient conditions on initialization hyperparameters that ensure trainability of deep…
Pretraining and fine-tuning are central stages in modern machine learning systems. In practice, feature learning plays an important role across both stages: deep neural networks learn a broad range of useful features during pretraining and…
In transformers, the positional encoding (PE) provides essential information that distinguishes the position and order amongst tokens in a sequence. Most prior investigations of PE effects on generalization were tailored to 1D input…
In continual learning from demonstration (CLfD), a robot learns a sequence of real-world motion skills continually from human demonstrations. Recently, hypernetworks have been successful in solving this problem. In this paper, we perform an…
The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…
Randomization is a powerful tool that endows algorithms with remarkable properties. For instance, randomized algorithms excel in adversarial settings, often surpassing the worst-case performance of deterministic algorithms with large…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) enjoys several benefits, such as data-efficiency and planning, by learning a model of the environment's dynamics. However, learning a global model that can generalize across different dynamics is a…
Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…
Continual learning aims to sequentially learn new tasks without forgetting previous tasks' knowledge (catastrophic forgetting). One factor that can cause forgetting is the interference between the gradients on losses from different tasks.…