Related papers: In-context learning and Occam's razor
In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of In-Context Learning (ICL) by addressing several open questions: (a) What type of ICL estimator is learned by large language models? (b) What is a proper performance metric for ICL and what…
In the last years decision-focused learning framework, also known as predict-and-optimize, have received increasing attention. In this setting, the predictions of a machine learning model are used as estimated cost coefficients in the…
Approximate learning machines have become popular in the era of small devices, including quantised, factorised, hashed, or otherwise compressed predictors, and the quest to explain and guarantee good generalisation abilities for such…
In-context learning (ICL) has transformed the use of large language models (LLMs) for NLP tasks, enabling few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples without finetuning. Despite its effectiveness, ICL is prone to errors,…
Statistics and Optimization are foundational to modern Machine Learning. Here, we propose an alternative foundation based on Abstract Algebra, with mathematics that facilitates the analysis of learning. In this approach, the goal of the…
Recent studies have noted an intriguing phenomenon termed Neural Collapse, that is, when the neural networks establish the right correlation between feature spaces and the training targets, their last-layer features, together with the…
The performance of machine learning model can be further improved if contextual cues are provided as input along with base features that are directly related to an inference task. In offline learning, one can inspect historical training…
Most language models (LMs) are trained and applied in an autoregressive left-to-right fashion, assuming that the next token only depends on the preceding ones. However, this assumption ignores the potential benefits of using the full…
While Reinforcement Learning ( RL) has made great strides towards solving increasingly complicated problems, many algorithms are still brittle to even slight environmental changes. Contextual Reinforcement Learning (cRL) provides a…
Large pretrained Transformer language models have been shown to exhibit zero-shot generalization, i.e. they can perform a wide variety of tasks that they were not explicitly trained on. However, the architectures and pretraining objectives…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in various scenarios. However, they suffer from much redundant information and are sensitive to the position of key information in long context scenarios. To address these…
A modern paradigm for generalization in machine learning and AI consists of pre-training a task-agnostic foundation model, generally obtained using self-supervised and multimodal contrastive learning. The resulting representations can be…
Prompted by misconceptions in the recent literature, we review the justifications for naturalness arguments and Occam's razor found in Bayesian statistics. We discuss the automatic Occam's razor that emerges in Bayesian formalism, bringing…
One of the objectives of designing feature selection learning algorithms is to obtain classifiers that depend on a small number of attributes and have verifiable future performance guarantees. There are few, if any, approaches that…
Sparse linear models are one of several core tools for interpretable machine learning, a field of emerging importance as predictive models permeate decision-making in many domains. Unfortunately, sparse linear models are far less flexible…
Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have made significant progress in encoding world knowledge and spawned a new set of learning paradigms including zero-shot, few-shot, and in-context learning. Many language tasks can be modeled as a…
Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…
This paper investigates context stickiness in in-context learning (ICL), a phenomenon where earlier examples in a prompt interfere with a transformer's ability to adapt to later tasks. Using synthetic regression tasks over linear and…
Induction heads are attention heads that perform inductive copying by matching patterns from earlier context and copying their continuations verbatim. As models develop induction heads, they experience a sharp drop in training loss, a…
Recently there has been a surge of interest in operations research (OR) and the machine learning (ML) community in combining prediction algorithms and optimization techniques to solve decision-making problems in the face of uncertainty.…