Related papers: Toward Understanding In-context vs. In-weight Lear…
Large language models leverage both parametric knowledge acquired during pretraining and in-context knowledge provided at inference time. Crucially, when these sources conflict, models arbitrate based on their internal confidence,…
In-context learning is a powerful capability of certain machine learning models that arguably underpins the success of today's frontier AI models. However, in-context learning is critically limited to settings where the in-context…
Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…
Large language models have been successful at tasks involving basic forms of in-context reasoning, such as generating coherent language, as well as storing vast amounts of knowledge. At the core of the Transformer architecture behind such…
We investigate the in-context learning capabilities of transformers for the $d$-dimensional mixture of linear regression model, providing theoretical insights into their existence, generalization bounds, and training dynamics. Specifically,…
Transformer models are now a cornerstone in natural language processing. Yet, explaining their decisions remains a challenge. It was shown recently that the same model trained on the same data with a different randomness can lead to very…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to learn new tasks from examples in its input without any parameter updates. In contrast to previous theories of ICL relying on toy models and data settings, recently it has been…
Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…
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…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, adapting to new tasks by simply conditioning on demonstrations without parameter updates. Compelling empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that ICL, as…
Previous theoretical results pertaining to meta-learning on sequences build on contrived assumptions and are somewhat convoluted. We introduce new information-theoretic tools that lead to an elegant and very general decomposition of error…
The in-context learning capabilities of modern language models have motivated a deeper mathematical understanding of sequence models. A line of recent work has shown that linear attention models can emulate projected gradient descent…
Large language models have shown tremendous performance in a variety of tasks. In-context learning -- the ability to improve at a task after being provided with a number of demonstrations -- is seen as one of the main contributors to their…
Task vectors offer a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles…
In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful ability that emerges in transformer models, enabling them to learn from context without weight updates. Recent work has established emergent ICL as a transient phenomenon that can sometimes disappear…
Transformer based language models exhibit intelligent behaviors such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, acquiring knowledge, reasoning, planning, reflecting and using tools. This paper explores how their underlying…
When trained on language data, do transformers learn some arbitrary computation that utilizes the full capacity of the architecture or do they learn a simpler, tree-like computation, hypothesized to underlie compositional meaning systems…
There have been many recent investigations into prompt-based training of transformer language models for new text genres in low-resource settings. The prompt-based training approach has been found to be effective in generalizing pre-trained…
Large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities to learn in-context, where exemplar input-output pairings are appended to the prompt for demonstration. However, existing work has demonstrated the ability of models to learn…