Related papers: One-Layer Transformer Provably Learns One-Nearest …
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…
Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…
Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance in natural language processing, making them highly effective in many human life-related or even job-related tasks. The attention mechanism in the Transformer…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…
Several recent works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate iterations of…
The remarkable ability of transformers to learn new concepts solely by reading examples within the input prompt, termed in-context learning (ICL), is a crucial aspect of intelligent behavior. Here, we focus on understanding the learning…
A striking property of transformers is their ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), a machine learning framework in which the learner is presented with a novel context during inference implicitly through some data, and tasked with…
Large language models based on the Transformer architecture have demonstrated impressive capabilities to learn in context. However, existing theoretical studies on how this phenomenon arises are limited to the dynamics of a single layer of…
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…
In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…
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…
This paper investigates the learning theory of Transformer networks for regression tasks on the compact Euclidean domain $[0,1]^d$ and $d$-dimensional compact Riemannian manifolds. We propose a novel constructive approximation framework for…
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…
We study the approximation capabilities, convergence speeds and on-convergence behaviors of transformers trained on in-context recall tasks -- which requires to recognize the \emph{positional} association between a pair of tokens from…
Transformers can efficiently learn in-context from example demonstrations. Most existing theoretical analyses studied the in-context learning (ICL) ability of transformers for linear function classes, where it is typically shown that the…
We prove that a minimal Transformer with frozen weights emulates a broad class of algorithms by in-context prompting. We formalize two modes of in-context algorithm emulation. In the task-specific mode, for any continuous function $f:…
Neural sequence models, especially transformers, exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning. They can construct new predictors from sequences of labeled examples $(x, f(x))$ presented in the input without further parameter…
Transformers have achieved extraordinary success in modern machine learning due to their excellent ability to handle sequential data, especially in next-token prediction (NTP) tasks. However, the theoretical understanding of their…
In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we study the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical…
Many neural network architectures are known to be Turing Complete, and can thus, in principle implement arbitrary algorithms. However, Transformers are unique in that they can implement gradient-based learning algorithms under simple…