English
Related papers

Related papers: Trained Transformer Classifiers Generalize and Exh…

200 papers

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

Modern deep neural networks display striking examples of rich internal computational structure. Uncovering principles governing the development of such structure is a priority for the science of deep learning. In this paper, we explore the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Liam Carroll , Jesse Hoogland , Matthew Farrugia-Roberts , Daniel Murfet

Deep Learning architectures, and in particular Transformers, are conventionally viewed as a composition of layers. These layers are actually often obtained as the sum of two contributions: a residual path that copies the input and the…

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for easily adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to various tasks. However, our understanding of how ICL works remains limited. We explore a simple model of ICL in a controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Omar Naim , Guilhem Fouilhé , Nicholas Asher

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

Transformers trained on natural language data have been shown to learn its hierarchical structure and generalize to sentences with unseen syntactic structures without explicitly encoding any structural bias. In this work, we investigate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Kabir Ahuja , Vidhisha Balachandran , Madhur Panwar , Tianxing He , Noah A. Smith , Navin Goyal , Yulia Tsvetkov

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-18 Jingfeng Wu , Difan Zou , Zixiang Chen , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Peter L. Bartlett

Transformers have demonstrated great power in the recent development of large foundational models. In particular, the Vision Transformer (ViT) has brought revolutionary changes to the field of vision, achieving significant accomplishments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Jiarui Jiang , Wei Huang , Miao Zhang , Taiji Suzuki , Liqiang Nie

We study learning to learn for the multi-task structured bandit problem where the goal is to learn a near-optimal algorithm that minimizes cumulative regret. The tasks share a common structure and an algorithm should exploit the shared…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Josiah P. Hanna , Qiaomin Xie , Robert Nowak

The pretrain-finetune paradigm usually improves downstream performance over training a model from scratch on the same task, becoming commonplace across many areas of machine learning. While pretraining is empirically observed to be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Gabriele Merlin , Vedant Nanda , Ruchit Rawal , Mariya Toneva

When faced with distribution shift at test time, deep neural networks often make inaccurate predictions with unreliable uncertainty estimates. While improving the robustness of neural networks is one promising approach to mitigate this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Aurick Zhou , Sergey Levine

We investigate the mechanisms that arise when transformers are trained to solve arithmetic on sequences where tokens are variables whose meaning is determined only through their interactions in-context. While prior work has studied…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Eric Todd , Jannik Brinkmann , Rohit Gandikota , David Bau

We find limits to the Transformer architecture for language modeling and show it has a universal prediction property in an information-theoretic sense. We further analyze performance in non-asymptotic data regimes to understand the role of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Sourya Basu , Moulik Choraria , Lav R. Varshney

The transformer architecture has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in modern artificial intelligence, among which the capability of implicitly learning an internal model during inference time is widely believed to play a key role in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zhiheng Chen , Ruofan Wu , Guanhua Fang

Overparameterized deep networks that generalize well have been key to the dramatic success of deep learning in recent years. The reasons for their remarkable ability to generalize are not well understood yet. When class labels in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Simran Ketha , Venkatakrishnan Ramaswamy

Despite the empirical success of prompt tuning in adapting pretrained language models to new tasks, theoretical analyses of its capabilities remain limited. Existing theoretical work primarily addresses universal approximation properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Maxime Meyer , Mario Michelessa , Caroline Chaux , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Transformer-based models for transfer learning have the potential to achieve high prediction accuracies on text-based supervised learning tasks with relatively few training data instances. These models are thus likely to benefit social…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-01 Sandra Wankmüller

Recurrent Neural Networks were, until recently, one of the best ways to capture the timely dependencies in sequences. However, with the introduction of the Transformer, it has been proven that an architecture with only attention-mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev

Efficient training and inference algorithms, such as low-rank adaption and model pruning, have shown impressive performance for learning Transformer-based large foundation models. However, due to the technical challenges of the non-convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Shuai Zhang , Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen

Deep learning methods have advanced quickly in brain imaging analysis over the past few years, but they are usually restricted by the limited labeled data. Pre-trained model on unlabeled data has presented promising improvement in feature…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-08-22 Jinlong Hu , Yangmin Huang , Nan Wang , Shoubin Dong