Related papers: Is In-Context Universality Enough? MLPs are Also U…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning, the ability to use information provided as context to improve prediction of future tokens. Induction heads have been argued to play a crucial role for in-context learning in…
While large language models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, understandings of such capabilities are still in an early stage, where existing theory and mechanistic…
With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It…
Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable empirical success in modeling contextual relations, yet a clear understanding of their expressive power is still lacking. In this work, we introduce a measure-theoretic framework in which…
Modern large language models (LLMs) are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Unlike traditional learners, LLMs cannot use back-propagation to obtain feedback, and condition…
We study the role of linguistic context in predicting quantifiers (`few', `all'). We collect crowdsourced data from human participants and test various models in a local (single-sentence) and a global context (multi-sentence) condition.…
Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…
In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…
Since the success of GPT, large language models (LLMs) have been revolutionizing machine learning and have initiated the so-called LLM prompting paradigm. In the era of LLMs, people train a single general-purpose LLM and provide the LLM…
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) represents a notable breakthrough in Natural Language Processing (NLP), contributing to substantial progress in both text comprehension and generation. However, amidst these advancements, it is…
We measure the performance of in-context learning as a function of task novelty and difficulty for open and closed questions. For that purpose, we created a novel benchmark consisting of hard scientific questions, each paired with a context…
Pretrained Transformers demonstrate remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. However, theoretical studies often rely on simplified architectures…
Despite the empirical success of foundation models, we do not have a systematic characterization of the representations that these models learn. In this paper, we establish the contexture theory. It shows that a large class of…
Traditionally, neural network training has been primarily viewed as an approximation of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). This interpretation originated in a time when training for multiple epochs on small datasets was common and…
Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…
In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of transformer-based language models, enabling them to perform tasks by conditioning on a small number of examples presented at inference time, without any parameter updates.…
In-context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability alongside the development of scaled-up large language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks…
Transformers have significantly impacted domains like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics, where they improve performance compared to other neural networks. This survey explores how transformers are used in…
Recent advancements in long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily concentrated on processing extended input contexts, resulting in significant strides in long-context comprehension. However, the equally critical aspect of…
Large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities to learn in-context, where exemplar input-output pairings are appended to the prompt for demonstration. However, existing work has demonstrated the ability of models to learn…