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Large language models based on the Transformer architecture have demonstrated impressive capabilities to learn in context. However, existing theoretical studies on how this phenomenon arises are limited to the dynamics of a single layer of…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate an impressive ability to utilise information within the context of their input sequences to appropriately respond to data unseen by the LLM during its training procedure. This ability is known as…
Neural networks trained via gradient descent with random initialization and without any regularization enjoy good generalization performance in practice despite being highly overparametrized. A promising direction to explain this phenomenon…
In-context learning (ICL) allows large models to adapt to tasks using a few examples, yet its extension to vision-language models (VLMs) remains fragile. Our analysis reveals that the fundamental limitation lies in an inductive gap, models…
We argue that in-context learning (ICL) predictably arises from standard self-supervised next-token pretraining, rather than being an exotic emergent property. This work establishes the foundational principles of this emergence by focusing…
As model context lengths continue to increase, the number of demonstrations that can be provided in-context approaches the size of entire training datasets. We study the behavior of in-context learning (ICL) at this extreme scale on…
In-context learning (ICL) is a hallmark capability of transformers, through which trained models learn to adapt to new tasks by leveraging information from the input context. Prior work has shown that ICL emerges in transformers due to the…
We propose to improve in-context learning (ICL) by optimizing the continuous embeddings of a fixed few-shot prompt at test time. The key observation is that the log-probabilities a model assigns to its demonstrated…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. However, the underlying working mechanism of ICL remains poorly understood. Recent research presents two conflicting views on ICL: One emphasizes the…
In-Context Learning (ICL), which formulates target tasks as prompt completion conditioned on in-context demonstrations, has become the prevailing utilization of LLMs. In this paper, we first disclose an actual predicament for this typical…
In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent task/function vector in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed…
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) employ multi-modal in-context learning (MM-ICL) to adapt to new tasks by leveraging demonstration examples. While increasing the number of demonstrations boosts performance, they incur significant…
Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…
Large language models have the ability to generate text that mimics patterns in their inputs. We introduce a simple Markov Chain sequence modeling task in order to study how this in-context learning (ICL) capability emerges. In our setting,…
High-dimensional, heterogeneous data with complex feature interactions pose significant challenges for traditional predictive modeling approaches. While Projection to Latent Structures (PLS) remains a popular technique, it struggles to…
In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…
In-context learning (ICL) improves language models' performance on a variety of NLP tasks by simply demonstrating a handful of examples at inference time. It is not well understood why ICL ability emerges, as the model has never been…
We study the dynamics of gradient flow for training a multi-head softmax attention model for in-context learning of multi-task linear regression. We establish the global convergence of gradient flow under suitable choices of initialization.…
The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remains poorly understood despite its consistent effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples. To clarify and improve these…
In-context Learning (ICL) utilizes structured demonstration-query inputs to induce few-shot learning on Language Models (LMs), which are not originally pre-trained on ICL-style data. To bridge the gap between ICL and pre-training, some…