Related papers: Toward Understanding In-context vs. In-weight Lear…
Transformer models exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL), adapting to novel tasks from examples within their context, yet the underlying mechanisms remain largely mysterious. Here, we provide an exact analytical characterization of…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored,…
Although transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities for in-context learning (ICL) in practice, theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanism that allows transformers to perform ICL is still in its infancy. This work aims…
In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine…
The phenomena of in-context learning has typically been thought of as "learning from examples". In this work which focuses on Machine Translation, we present a perspective of in-context learning as the desired generation task maintaining…
Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…
We argue that in-context learning (ICL) predictably arises from standard self-supervised next-token pretraining, rather than being an exotic emergent property. This work establishes the foundational principles of this emergence by focusing…
Large language models can solve tasks that were not present in the training set. This capability is believed to be due to in-context learning and skill composition. In this work, we study the emergence of in-context learning and skill…
This paper explores the elusive mechanism underpinning in-context learning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Our work provides a novel perspective by examining in-context learning via the lens of surface repetitions. We quantitatively…
Large language models are capable of in-context learning, the ability to perform new tasks at test time using a handful of input-output examples, without parameter updates. We develop a universal approximation theory to elucidate how…
Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…
Controlled generation refers to the problem of creating text that contains stylistic or semantic attributes of interest. Many approaches reduce this problem to training a predictor of the desired attribute. For example, researchers hoping…
In-context learning is a key paradigm in large language models (LLMs) that enables them to generalize to new tasks and domains by simply prompting these models with a few exemplars without explicit parameter updates. Many attempts have been…
Transformer models can use two fundamentally different kinds of information: information stored in weights during training, and information provided ``in-context'' at inference time. In this work, we show that transformers exhibit different…
Transformers have demonstrated exceptional in-context learning capabilities, yet the theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms remains limited. A recent work (Elhage et al., 2021) identified a ``rich'' in-context mechanism…
We investigate training strategies that co-develop in-context learning (ICL) and in-weights learning (IWL), and the ability to switch between them based on context relevance. Although current LLMs exhibit both modes, standard task-specific…
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…
The Transformer architecture has become prominent in developing large causal language models. However, mechanisms to explain its capabilities are not well understood. Focused on the training process, here we establish a meta-learning view…
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…