English
Related papers

Related papers: How Transformers Utilize Multi-Head Attention in I…

200 papers

Large transformer models have been shown to be capable of performing in-context learning. By using examples in a prompt as well as a query, they are capable of performing tasks such as few-shot, one-shot, or zero-shot learning to output the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Antony Zhao , Alex Proshkin , Fergal Hennessy , Francesco Crivelli

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Large-scale foundation models for scientific machine learning adapt to physical settings unseen during training, such as zero-shot transfer between turbulent scales. This phenomenon, in-context learning, challenges conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Anthony Bao , Jeffrey Lai , William Gilpin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Shohei Taniguchi , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

In-context learning is a remarkable property of transformers and has been the focus of recent research. An attention mechanism is a key component in transformers, in which an attention matrix encodes relationships between words in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Katsuyuki Hagiwara

The Transformer is a sequence model that forgoes traditional recurrent architectures in favor of a fully attention-based approach. Besides improving performance, an advantage of using attention is that it can also help to interpret a model…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Jesse Vig

Language models have been shown to perform better with an increase in scale on a wide variety of tasks via the in-context learning paradigm. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the ability of a large language model to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-17 Hritik Bansal , Karthik Gopalakrishnan , Saket Dingliwal , Sravan Bodapati , Katrin Kirchhoff , Dan Roth

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Hongfei Xu , Qiuhui Liu , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

The multi-head self-attention mechanism of the transformer model has been thoroughly investigated recently. In one vein of study, researchers are interested in understanding why and how transformers work. In another vein, researchers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Raymond Li , Wen Xiao , Linzi Xing , Lanjun Wang , Gabriel Murray , Giuseppe Carenini

Central to the success of Transformers is the attention block, which effectively models global dependencies among input tokens associated to a dataset. However, we theoretically demonstrate that standard attention mechanisms in transformers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hemanth Saratchandran

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

Large transformer models trained on diverse datasets have shown a remarkable ability to learn in-context, achieving high few-shot performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained to solve. In this paper, we study the in-context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Jonathan N. Lee , Annie Xie , Aldo Pacchiano , Yash Chandak , Chelsea Finn , Ofir Nachum , Emma Brunskill

Large language models have shown tremendous performance in a variety of tasks. In-context learning -- the ability to improve at a task after being provided with a number of demonstrations -- is seen as one of the main contributors to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Julian Coda-Forno , Marcel Binz , Zeynep Akata , Matthew Botvinick , Jane X. Wang , Eric Schulz

The in-context learning capabilities of modern language models have motivated a deeper mathematical understanding of sequence models. A line of recent work has shown that linear attention models can emulate projected gradient descent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Xiangyu Chang , Yingcong Li , Muti Kara , Samet Oymak , Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury

Transformers have a remarkable ability to learn and execute tasks based on examples provided within the input itself, without explicit prior training. It has been argued that this capability, known as in-context learning (ICL), is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-06 Yue M. Lu , Mary I. Letey , Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Anindita Maiti , Cengiz Pehlevan

Contrastive Learning (CL) has emerged as a powerful method for training feature extraction models using unlabeled data. Recent studies suggest that incorporating a linear projection head post-backbone significantly enhances model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Huanran Li , Daniel Pimentel-Alarcón

Transformers robustly exhibit the ability to perform in-context learning, whereby their predictive accuracy on a task can increase not by parameter updates but merely with the placement of training samples in their context windows. Recent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-10 Abhiti Mishra , Yash Patel , Ambuj Tewari

Recently, self-attention models such as Transformers have given competitive results compared to recurrent neural network systems in speech recognition. The key factor for the outstanding performance of self-attention models is their ability…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-29 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals