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Related papers: Transformers are Universal In-context Learners

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Transformers have emerged as a powerful neural network architecture capable of tackling a wide range of learning tasks. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis of their ability to automatically extract structure from data in an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Pierre Marion , Claire Boyer

The use of attention-based deep learning models in stochastic filtering, e.g. transformers and deep Kalman filters, has recently come into focus; however, the potential for these models to solve stochastic filtering problems remains largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Blanka Horvath , Anastasis Kratsios , Yannick Limmer , Xuwei Yang

Transformer-based language models spread FLOPs uniformly across input sequences. In this work we demonstrate that transformers can instead learn to dynamically allocate FLOPs (or compute) to specific positions in a sequence, optimising the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-04 David Raposo , Sam Ritter , Blake Richards , Timothy Lillicrap , Peter Conway Humphreys , Adam Santoro

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing tasks. The self-attention architecture allows transformer to combine information from all elements of a sequence into context-aware…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Mikhail S. Burtsev , Yuri Kuratov , Anton Peganov , Grigory V. Sapunov

While large language models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, understandings of such capabilities are still in an early stage, where existing theory and mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Tianyu Guo , Wei Hu , Song Mei , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Silvio Savarese , Yu Bai

Transformers are crucial across many AI fields, such as large language models, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. This prominence stems from the architecture's perceived universality and scalability compared to alternatives. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Amirreza Abbasi , Mohsen Hooshmand

In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 William L. Tong , Cengiz Pehlevan

Our paper challenges claims from prior research that transformer-based models, when learning in context, implicitly implement standard learning algorithms. We present empirical evidence inconsistent with this view and provide a mathematical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-10 Omar Naim , Jerome Bolte , Nicholas Asher

Transformer based models have shown remarkable capabilities in sequence learning across a wide range of tasks, often performing well on specific task by leveraging input-output examples. Despite their empirical success, a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yifan Hao , Chenlu Ye , Chi Han , Tong Zhang

The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. This success has contributed to the belief that "bigger means…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hemanth Saratchandran , Damien Teney , Simon Lucey

Despite the growing use of transformer models in computer vision, a mechanistic understanding of these networks is still needed. This work introduces a method to reverse-engineer Vision Transformers trained to solve image classification…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Martina G. Vilas , Timothy Schaumlöffel , Gemma Roig

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-23 Ruiqi Zhang , Spencer Frei , Peter L. Bartlett

Representing token embeddings as probability distributions over learned manifolds allows for more flexible contextual inference, reducing representational rigidity while enhancing semantic granularity. Comparative evaluations demonstrate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Christopher Nightingale , Dominic Lavington , Jonathan Thistlethwaite , Sebastian Penhaligon , Thomas Belinski , David Boldo

Transformer is a powerful architecture that achieves superior performance on various sequence learning tasks, including neural machine translation, language understanding, and sequence prediction. At the core of the Transformer is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Shaojie Bai , Makoto Yamada , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Siquan Li , Yao Tong , Haonan Wang , Tianyang Hu

Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Shunjie Wang , Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

Transformers were initially introduced for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but fast they were adopted by most deep learning fields, including computer vision. They measure the relationships between pairs of input tokens (words in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Robin Courant , Maika Edberg , Nicolas Dufour , Vicky Kalogeiton

We investigate the universal approximation property (UAP) of transformer-type architectures, providing a unified theoretical framework that extends prior results on residual networks to models incorporating attention mechanisms. Our work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jingpu Cheng , Ting Lin , Zuowei Shen , Qianxiao Li

Despite the great success of Transformer networks in various applications such as natural language processing and computer vision, their theoretical aspects are not well understood. In this paper, we study the approximation and estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Shokichi Takakura , Taiji Suzuki
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