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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,…
Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…
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…
Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…
In-context learning is a remarkable capability of transformers, referring to their ability to adapt to specific tasks based on a short history or context. Previous research has found that task-specific information is locally encoded within…
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…
Transformer models are permutation equivariant. To supply the order and type information of the input tokens, position and segment embeddings are usually added to the input. Recent works proposed variations of positional encodings with…
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…
Search is an ability foundational in many important tasks, and recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) struggle to perform search robustly. It is unknown whether this inability is due to a lack of data, insufficient…
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…
Understanding the training dynamics of transformers is important to explain the impressive capabilities behind large language models. In this work, we study the dynamics of training a shallow transformer on a task of recognizing…
This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…
Increase in data, size, or compute can lead to sudden learning of specific capabilities by a neural network -- a phenomenon often called "emergence''. Beyond scientific understanding, establishing the causal factors underlying such emergent…
Understanding the transformer architecture and its workings is essential for machine learning (ML) engineers. However, truly understanding the transformer architecture can be demanding, even if you have a solid background in machine…
In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…
Neural sequence models, especially transformers, exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning. They can construct new predictors from sequences of labeled examples $(x, f(x))$ presented in the input without further parameter…
This paper investigates approximation-theoretic aspects of the in-context learning capability of the transformers in representing a family of noisy linear dynamical systems. Our first theoretical result establishes an upper bound on the…
Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…
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…
In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…