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In-Context Learning (ICL) is a phenomenon where task learning occurs through a prompt sequence without the necessity of parameter updates. ICL in Multi-Headed Attention (MHA) with absolute positional embedding has been the focus of more…
The current large language models are mainly based on decode-only structure transformers, which have great in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. It is generally believed that the important foundation of its ICL capability is the induction…
We perform in-depth evaluations of in-context learning (ICL) on state-of-the-art transformer, state-space, and hybrid large language models over two categories of knowledge-based ICL tasks. Using a combination of behavioral probing and…
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…
While transformers have proven enormously successful in a range of tasks, their fundamental properties as models of computation are not well understood. This paper contributes to the study of the expressive capacity of transformers,…
Recent studies suggest that large language models (LLMs) possess the capability to solve graph reasoning tasks. Notably, even when graph structures are embedded within textual descriptions, LLMs can still effectively answer related…
In-context learning (ICL) allows some autoregressive models to solve tasks via next-token prediction and without needing further training. This has led to claims about these model's ability to solve (learn) unseen tasks with only a few…
Modern distributed networks, notably transformers, acquire a remarkable ability (termed `in-context learning') to adapt their computation to input statistics, such that a fixed network can be applied to data from a broad range of systems.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven effective at In-Context Learning (ICL), an ability that allows them to create predictors from labeled examples. Few studies have explored the interplay between ICL and specific properties of…
We study transformers' in-context learning of variable-length Markov chains (VOMCs), focusing on the finite-sample accuracy as the number of in-context examples increases. Compared to fixed-order Markov chains (FOMCs), learning VOMCs is…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. In this study, we explore a surprising phenomenon related to ICL: LLMs can perform multiple, computationally distinct ICL tasks…
Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning (IWL), where memorized information is encoded in model…
We investigate the ability of transformers to perform in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL), where a model must infer and execute learning algorithms from trajectory data without parameter updates. We show that a linear self-attention…
Modern language models rely on the transformer architecture and attention mechanism to perform language understanding and text generation. In this work, we study learning a 1-layer self-attention model from a set of prompts and associated…
In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to learn from a few examples provided in the prompt, enabling downstream generalization without the requirement for gradient updates. Despite encouragingly…
Recent research has shown that Transformers with linear attention are capable of in-context learning (ICL) by implementing a linear estimator through gradient descent steps. However, the existing results on the optimization landscape apply…
Transformer-based language models excel at in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to new tasks based on contextual examples, without parameter updates. In a specific form of ICL, which we refer to as \textit{contextual recall},…
In-context learning (ICL) is the ability of a large language model (LLM) to learn a new task from a few demonstrations presented as part of the context. Past studies have attributed a large portion of the success of ICL to the way these…
Encoder transformer models compress information from all tokens in a sequence into a single [CLS] token to represent global context. This approach risks diluting fine-grained or hierarchical features, leading to information loss in…
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…