Related papers: One-Layer Transformer Provably Learns One-Nearest …
This paper investigates approximation-theoretic aspects of the in-context learning capability of the transformers in representing a family of noisy linear dynamical systems. Our first theoretical result establishes an upper bound on the…
Existing analyses of the expressive capacity of Transformer models have required excessively deep layers for data memorization, leading to a discrepancy with the Transformers actually used in practice. This is primarily due to the…
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…
Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning capabilities, prompting extensive research into its underlying mechanisms. Recent studies have suggested that Transformers can implement first-order optimization…
Pre-trained transformers exhibit the capability of adapting to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL), where they efficiently utilize a limited set of prompts without explicit model optimization. The canonical communication problem of…
Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…
Sequence modelling requires determining which past tokens are causally relevant from the context and their importance: a process inherent to the attention layers in transformers, yet whose underlying learned mechanisms remain poorly…
Recent research has demonstrated that transformers, particularly linear attention models, implicitly execute gradient-descent-like algorithms on data provided in-context during their forward inference step. However, their capability in…
Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…
Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in language modeling tasks. However, the reasons behind their tremendous success are still unclear. In this paper, towards a better understanding, we train a Transformer model on a…
Transformers have achieved great success across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundations underlying their success remain largely unexplored. To demystify the strong capacities of transformers applied to versatile…
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…
In-context learning refers to the ability of a model to condition on a prompt sequence consisting of in-context examples (input-output pairs corresponding to some task) along with a new query input, and generate the corresponding output.…
We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…
Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power 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…
The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…
Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…
Pre-trained large language models based on Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With just a few demonstration examples, the models can implement new tasks without any parameter updates. However, it…
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…