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Many neural network architectures are known to be Turing Complete, and can thus, in principle implement arbitrary algorithms. However, Transformers are unique in that they can implement gradient-based learning algorithms under simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Xiang Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Suvrit Sra

We study theoretical guarantees for solving linear systems in-context using a linear transformer architecture. For in-domain generalization, we provide neural scaling laws that bound the generalization error in terms of the number of tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Frank Cole , Yulong Lu , Wuzhe Xu , Tianhao Zhang

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling tasks such as natural language processing or audio processing, and they are now even considered for tasks that are not naturally sequential such as image…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Jorg Bornschein , Yazhe Li , Amal Rannen-Triki

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yingcong Li , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

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

Transformers excel at discovering patterns in sequential data, yet their fundamental limitations and learning mechanisms remain crucial topics of investigation. In this paper, we study the ability of Transformers to learn pseudo-random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Tao Tao , Darshil Doshi , Dayal Singh Kalra , Tianyu He , Maissam Barkeshli

The growth of global consumption has motivated important applications of deep learning to smart manufacturing and machine health monitoring. In particular, analyzing vibration data offers great potential to extract meaningful insights into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Anthony Zhou , Amir Barati Farimani

In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models becomes available over time. Unfortunately, these models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Beyza Ermis , Giovanni Zappella , Martin Wistuba , Aditya Rawal , Cedric Archambeau

Symbolic regression algorithms search a space of mathematical expressions for formulas that explain given data. Transformer-based models have emerged as a promising, scalable approach shifting the expensive combinatorial search to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Henrik Voigt , Paul Kahlmeyer , Kai Lawonn , Michael Habeck , Joachim Giesen

Pre-trained Transformers are now ubiquitous in natural language processing, but despite their high end-task performance, little is known empirically about whether they are calibrated. Specifically, do these models' posterior probabilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Shrey Desai , Greg Durrett

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

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-06 Michael E. Sander , Raja Giryes , Taiji Suzuki , Mathieu Blondel , Gabriel Peyré

Transformers serve as the foundational architecture for large language and video generation models, such as GPT, BERT, SORA and their successors. Empirical studies have demonstrated that real-world data and learning tasks exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhaiming Shen , Alex Havrilla , Rongjie Lai , Alexander Cloninger , Wenjing Liao

Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiuqi Wang , Ethan Blaser , Hadi Daneshmand , Shangtong Zhang

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of large pretrained transformers, enabling them to solve new tasks implicit in example input-output pairs without any gradient updates. Despite its practical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Joshua Hill , Benjamin Eyre , Elliot Creager

There has been significant recent interest in understanding the capacity of Transformers for in-context learning (ICL), yet most theory focuses on supervised settings with explicitly labeled pairs. In practice, Transformers often perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jiashuo Fan , Paul Rosu , Aaron T. Wang , Zeyu Michael Li , Lawrence Carin , Xiang Cheng

"Benign overfitting", where classifiers memorize noisy training data yet still achieve a good generalization performance, has drawn great attention in the machine learning community. To explain this surprising phenomenon, a series of works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Jinghui Chen , Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade