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Transformer based large-language models (LLMs) display extreme proficiency with language yet a precise understanding of how they work remains elusive. One way of demystifying transformer predictions would be to describe how they depend on…
In-context learning allows models like transformers to adapt to new tasks from a few examples without updating their weights, a desirable trait for reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing in-context RL methods, such as Algorithm…
Non-stationary sequences arise naturally in control, forecasting, and decision-making. The data-generating process shifts at unknown times, and models must detect the change, discard or downweight obsolete evidence, and adapt to new…
Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…
Much theoretical work has described the ability of transformers to represent formal languages. However, linking theoretical results to empirical performance is not straightforward due to the complex interplay between the architecture, the…
Recent studies show that transformer-based architectures emulate gradient descent during a forward pass, contributing to in-context learning capabilities - an ability where the model adapts to new tasks based on a sequence of prompt…
In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…
$N$-gram language models (LM) have been largely superseded by neural LMs as the latter exhibits better performance. However, we find that $n$-gram models can achieve satisfactory performance on a large proportion of testing cases,…
Neural sequence models, especially transformers, exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning. They can construct new predictors from sequences of labeled examples $(x, f(x))$ presented in the input without further parameter…
Large language models based on the Transformer architecture have demonstrated impressive capabilities to learn in context. However, existing theoretical studies on how this phenomenon arises are limited to the dynamics of a single layer of…
It has recently been demonstrated empirically that in-context learning emerges in transformers when certain distributional properties are present in the training data, but this ability can also diminish upon further training. We provide a…
The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…
In-context learning has been recognized as a key factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). It refers to the model's ability to learn patterns on the fly from provided in-context examples in the prompt during inference. Previous…
Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…
Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…
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,…
We investigate the effective memory depth of RNN models by using them for $n$-gram language model (LM) smoothing. Experiments on a small corpus (UPenn Treebank, one million words of training data and 10k vocabulary) have found the LSTM cell…
At present, the mechanisms of in-context learning in Transformers are not well understood and remain mostly an intuition. In this paper, we suggest that training Transformers on auto-regressive objectives is closely related to…
Recent work has shown that Transformers can perform in-context learning for linear regression under restrictive assumptions, including i.i.d. data, Gaussian noise, and Gaussian regression coefficients. However, real-world data often violate…
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…