English
Related papers

Related papers: Analyzing limits for in-context learning

200 papers

Humans and animals show remarkable learning efficiency, adapting to new environments with minimal experience. This capability is not well captured by standard reinforcement learning algorithms that rely on incremental value updates. Rapid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ching Fang , Kanaka Rajan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Hadi Daneshmand , Suvrit Sra

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-03 Juno Kim , Tai Nakamaki , Taiji Suzuki

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Jathin Korrapati , Patrick Mendoza , Aditya Tomar , Abein Abraham

This paper studies interpretable and fair artificial intelligence architectures for understanding English reading. Introduced transformer-based models, integrating advanced attention mechanisms and gradient-based feature attribution. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Ping Li

Transformers have dominated empirical machine learning models of natural language processing. In this paper, we introduce basic concepts of Transformers and present key techniques that form the recent advances of these models. This includes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu

Neural sequence models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) abilities, where they can perform new tasks when prompted with training and test examples, without any parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Yu Bai , Fan Chen , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Song Mei

Online learning is a familiar problem setting within Machine-Learning in which data is presented serially in time to a learning agent, requiring it to progressively adapt within the constraints of the learning algorithm. More sophisticated…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-03-10 David Windridge

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Max Vladymyrov , Johannes von Oswald , Mark Sandler , Rong Ge

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit positional bias, struggling to utilize information from the middle or end of long contexts. Our study explores LLMs' long-context reasoning by probing their hidden representations. We find that while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Taiming Lu , Muhan Gao , Kuai Yu , Adam Byerly , Daniel Khashabi

Symbolic regression algorithms search a space of mathematical expressions for formulas that explain given data. Transformer-based models have emerged as a promising, scalable approach shifting the expensive combinatorial search to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Henrik Voigt , Paul Kahlmeyer , Kai Lawonn , Michael Habeck , Joachim Giesen

We discuss conceptual limitations of generic learning algorithms pursuing adversarial goals in competitive environments, and prove that they are subject to limitations that are analogous to the constraints on knowledge imposed by the famous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Alexander Y Klimenko , Dimitri A Klimenko

Training autonomous agents that can learn new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations is a long-standing problem in machine learning. Recently, transformers have been shown to learn new language or vision tasks without any weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Sharath Chandra Raparthy , Eric Hambro , Robert Kirk , Mikael Henaff , Roberta Raileanu

Transformers have theoretical limitations in modeling certain sequence-to-sequence tasks, yet it remains largely unclear if these limitations play a role in large-scale pretrained LLMs, or whether LLMs might effectively overcome these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Mayank Jobanputra , Yana Veitsman , Yash Sarrof , Aleksandra Bakalova , Vera Demberg , Ellie Pavlick , Michael Hahn

Transformers underlie almost all state-of-the-art language models in computational linguistics, yet their cognitive adequacy as models of human sentence processing remains disputed. In this work, we use a surprisal-based linking mechanism…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Titus von der Malsburg , Sebastian Padó

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Pranav Agarwal , Aamer Abdul Rahman , Pierre-Luc St-Charles , Simon J. D. Prince , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

We investigate the in-context learning capabilities of transformers for the $d$-dimensional mixture of linear regression model, providing theoretical insights into their existence, generalization bounds, and training dynamics. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Yanhao Jin , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Lifeng Lai

Borrowing from the transformer models that revolutionized the field of natural language processing, self-supervised feature learning for visual tasks has also seen state-of-the-art success using these extremely deep, isotropic networks.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-01 George Cazenavette , Simon Lucey

What is the relationship between model architecture and the ability to perform in-context learning? In this empirical study, we take the first steps toward answering this question. We evaluate thirteen model architectures capable of causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Ivan Lee , Nan Jiang , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

The transformer architecture has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in modern artificial intelligence, among which the capability of implicitly learning an internal model during inference time is widely believed to play a key role in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zhiheng Chen , Ruofan Wu , Guanhua Fang