Related papers: Fine-grained Analysis of In-context Linear Estimat…
Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…
In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…
Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…
Transformer models have become foundational across a wide range of scientific and engineering domains due to their strong empirical performance. A key capability underlying their success is in-context learning (ICL): when presented with a…
Transformers pretrained on diverse tasks exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to solve unseen tasks solely based on input contexts without adjusting model parameters. In this paper, we study ICL in one of…
Recent work has demonstrated that transformers and linear attention models can perform in-context learning (ICL) on simple function classes, such as linear regression. In this paper, we empirically study how these two attention mechanisms…
In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…
In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) studies agents that, after pretraining, adapt to new tasks by conditioning on additional context without parameter updates. Existing theoretical analyses of ICRL largely rely on linear attention,…
We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…
While attention-based models have demonstrated the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL), the theoretical understanding of how these models acquired this ability through gradient descent training is still preliminary. Towards…
Transformer-based models demonstrate a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to unseen tasks from a few prompt examples without parameter updates. Recent research has illuminated how Transformers perform…
In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we study the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical…
In-context learning (ICL) has shown impressive results in few-shot learning tasks, yet its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. A recent line of work suggests that ICL performs gradient descent (GD)-based optimization…
Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in…
We study the \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) ability of a \emph{Linear Transformer Block} (LTB) that combines a linear attention component and a linear multi-layer perceptron (MLP) component. For ICL of linear regression with a Gaussian…
The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…
In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…
In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…
The unusual properties of in-context learning (ICL) have prompted investigations into the internal mechanisms of large language models. Prior work typically focuses on either special attention heads or task vectors at specific layers, but…