Related papers: What One Cannot, Two Can: Two-Layer Transformers P…
Task vectors offer a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles…
In-Context Learning (ICL) enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) with demonstrations. However, obtaining these demonstrations primarily relies on manual effort. In most real-world scenarios, users are often unwilling or…
Do transformers, when trained on sequential reasoning traces, build internal models of the underlying task? And if so, does the structure of those internal representations mirror the structure of the domain? We train an 8-layer transformer…
In-context learning (ICL), a property demonstrated by transformer-based sequence models, refers to the automatic inference of an input-output mapping based on examples of the mapping provided as context. ICL requires no explicit learning,…
In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across diverse tasks, exhibiting emergent properties such as semantic prompt comprehension, In-Context Learning (ICL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Despite their…
In-context learning (ICL) exhibits dual operating modes: task learning, i.e., acquiring a new skill from in-context samples, and task retrieval, i.e., locating and activating a relevant pretrained skill. Recent theoretical work investigates…
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) improves language models' performance on a variety of NLP tasks by simply demonstrating a handful of examples at inference time. It is not well understood why ICL ability emerges, as the model has never been…
Large transformer models pretrained on offline reinforcement learning datasets have demonstrated remarkable in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) capabilities, where they can make good decisions when prompted with interaction…
Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…
The in-context learning (ICL) capability of pre-trained models based on the transformer architecture has received growing interest in recent years. While theoretical understanding has been obtained for ICL in reinforcement learning (RL),…
This paper investigates the relationship between large language models' (LLMs) ability to recognize repetitive input patterns and their performance on in-context learning (ICL). In contrast to prior work that has primarily focused on…
The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) is potentially attributed to two major abilities: task recognition (TR) for recognizing the task from demonstrations and utilizing pre-trained priors, and task learning (TL) for learning from…
Transformers pretrained on diverse tasks exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to solve unseen tasks solely based on input contexts without adjusting model parameters. In this paper, we study ICL in one of…
We study the \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) ability of a \emph{Linear Transformer Block} (LTB) that combines a linear attention component and a linear multi-layer perceptron (MLP) component. For ICL of linear regression with a Gaussian…
Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformers, excel as few-shot learners capable of in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a model is trained to adapt its operation to a new task based on limited contextual information, typically in…
In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to solve novel tasks without weight updates. Despite its empirical success, the mechanism behind ICL remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to interpret, improve, and…
In-context learning (ICL) adapts LLMs by providing demonstrations without fine-tuning the model parameters; however, it does not differentiate between demonstrations and quadratically increases the complexity of Transformer LLMs, exhausting…
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate an impressive ability to utilise information within the context of their input sequences to appropriately respond to data unseen by the LLM during its training procedure. This ability is known as…