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The recently introduced TabPFN pretrains an In-Context Learning (ICL) transformer on synthetic data to perform tabular data classification. In this work, we extend TabPFN to the fine-tuning setting, resulting in a significant performance…
In-context learning (ICL) is one of the most powerful and most unexpected capabilities to emerge in recent transformer-based large language models (LLMs). Yet the mechanisms that underlie it are poorly understood. In this paper, we…
The emergence of In-Context Learning (ICL) in LLMs remains a remarkable phenomenon that is partially understood. To explain ICL, recent studies have created theoretical connections to Gradient Descent (GD). We ask, do such connections hold…
In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…
At present, the mechanisms of in-context learning in Transformers are not well understood and remain mostly an intuition. In this paper, we suggest that training Transformers on auto-regressive objectives is closely related to…
One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to learn in-context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight update when these patterns are presented in…
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…
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…
In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) studies agents that, after pretraining, adapt to new tasks by conditioning on additional context without parameter updates. Existing theoretical analyses of ICRL largely rely on linear attention,…
Autoregressively trained transformers have brought a profound revolution to the world, especially with their in-context learning (ICL) ability to address downstream tasks. Recently, several studies suggest that transformers learn a…
Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based models in various real-world tasks, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent studies have suggested that transformers can implement gradient descent as an in-context…
We propose to improve in-context learning (ICL) by optimizing the continuous embeddings of a fixed few-shot prompt at test time. The key observation is that the log-probabilities a model assigns to its demonstrated…
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,…
Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformers, excel as few-shot learners capable of in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a model is trained to adapt its operation to a new task based on limited contextual information, typically in…
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…
Pretrained Transformers can perform in-context learning (ICL) from a few demonstrations, but this ability can fail sharply when the test distribution differs from pretraining, a common deployment setting. We study attention temperature as a…
The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities on textual data. We explore whether these capabilities can be extended to continuous vectors from diverse domains, obtained from black-box pretrained…
Large-scale Transformer language models (LMs) trained solely on next-token prediction with web-scale data can solve a wide range of tasks after seeing just a few examples. The mechanism behind this capability, known as in-context learning…