Related papers: Learning and Transferring Sparse Contextual Bigram…
We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…
Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable.…
Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…
Scalable Bayesian sampling is playing an important role in modern machine learning, especially in the fast-developed unsupervised-(deep)-learning models. While tremendous progresses have been achieved via scalable Bayesian sampling such as…
In-context learning, the ability to adapt based on a few examples in the input prompt, is a ubiquitous feature of large language models (LLMs). However, as LLMs' in-context learning abilities continue to improve, understanding this…
Currently, progressively larger deep neural networks are trained on ever growing data corpora. As this trend is only going to increase in the future, distributed training schemes are becoming increasingly relevant. A major issue in…
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…
Transformers have become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling tasks such as natural language processing or audio processing, and they are now even considered for tasks that are not naturally sequential such as image…
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,…
In Transformer language models, activation vectors transform from current token embeddings to next token predictions as they pass through the model. To isolate a minimal form of this transformation, we identify language model subnetworks…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable success across various applications. However, the success of transformers have not been understood in theory. In this work, we give a case study of how transformers can be trained to learn a classic…
Convolutional sparse coding (CSC) has been popularly used for the learning of shift-invariant dictionaries in image and signal processing. However, existing methods have limited scalability. In this paper, instead of convolving with a…
Continual learning is a problem for artificial neural networks that their biological counterparts are adept at solving. Building on work using Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM) to connect a core neural circuit with the powerful Transformer…
The skip-gram (SG) model learns word representation by predicting the words surrounding a center word from unstructured text data. However, not all words in the context window contribute to the meaning of the center word. For example, less…
We propose Bayesian optimal sequential prediction as a new principle for understanding in-context learning (ICL). Unlike interpretations framing Transformers as performing implicit gradient descent, we formalize ICL as meta-learning over…
Modern large-scale Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved tremendous success on a wide range of downstream tasks. However, most of the LM pre-training objectives only focus on text reconstruction, but have not sought to learn…
This paper introduces a high-order Markov chain task to investigate how transformers learn to integrate information from multiple past positions with varying statistical significance. We demonstrate that transformers learn this task…
In this work, we propose a Bayesian type sparse deep learning algorithm. The algorithm utilizes a set of spike-and-slab priors for the parameters in the deep neural network. The hierarchical Bayesian mixture will be trained using an…
Training a deep neural network requires a large amount of single-task data and involves a long time-consuming optimization phase. This is not scalable to complex, realistic environments with new unexpected changes. Humans can perform fast…
Sentence-level classification and sequential labeling are two fundamental tasks in language understanding. While these two tasks are usually modeled separately, in reality, they are often correlated, for example in intent classification and…