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Overfit is a fundamental problem in machine learning in general, and in deep learning in particular. In order to reduce overfit and improve generalization in the classification of images, some employ invariance to a group of…
Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…
Ridge regression with random coefficients provides an important alternative to fixed coefficients regression in high dimensional setting when the effects are expected to be small but not zeros. This paper considers estimation and prediction…
Exploiting data invariances is crucial for efficient learning in both artificial and biological neural circuits. Understanding how neural networks can discover appropriate representations capable of harnessing the underlying symmetries of…
Machine learning systems often acquire biases by leveraging undesired features in the data, impacting accuracy variably across different sub-populations. Current understanding of bias formation mostly focuses on the initial and final stages…
Many learning algorithms have invariances: when their training data is transformed in certain ways, the function they learn transforms in a predictable manner. Here we formalize this notion using concepts from the mathematical field of…
Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…
Transformers underpin modern large language models (LLMs) and are commonly assumed to be behaviorally unstructured at random initialization, with all meaningful preferences emerging only through large-scale training. We challenge this…
Transformers can implement both generalizable algorithms (e.g., induction heads) and simple positional shortcuts (e.g., memorizing fixed output positions). In this work, we study how the choice of pretraining data distribution steers a…
The training dynamics and generalization properties of neural networks (NN) can be precisely characterized in function space via the neural tangent kernel (NTK). Structural changes to the NTK during training reflect feature learning and…
Deep Learning architectures, and in particular Transformers, are conventionally viewed as a composition of layers. These layers are actually often obtained as the sum of two contributions: a residual path that copies the input and the…
Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities, but the mechanisms underlying relational reasoning remain poorly understood. We investigate how transformers perform \textit{transitive inference}, a classic…
Many types of data from fields including natural language processing, computer vision, and bioinformatics, are well represented by discrete, compositional structures such as trees, sequences, or matchings. Latent structure models are a…
Behavioral changes in animals and humans, as a consequence of an error or a verbal instruction, can be extremely rapid. Improvement in behavioral performances are usually associated in machine learning and reinforcement learning to synaptic…
In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…
Transformer models have emerged as fundamental tools across various scientific and engineering disciplines, owing to their outstanding performance in diverse applications. Despite this empirical success, the theoretical foundations of…
Neural network training is typically viewed as gradient descent on a loss surface. We propose a fundamentally different perspective: learning is a structure-preserving transformation (a functor L) between the space of network parameters…
In order to better understand feature learning in neural networks, we propose a framework for understanding linear models in tangent feature space where the features are allowed to be transformed during training. We consider linear…
Transformers have demonstrated exceptional in-context learning capabilities, yet the theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms remains limited. A recent work (Elhage et al., 2021) identified a ``rich'' in-context mechanism…
Over the past decade, deep learning has proven to be a highly effective tool for learning meaningful features from raw data. However, it remains an open question how deep networks perform hierarchical feature learning across layers. In this…