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Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to organize the representations of input sequences into straighter neural trajectories in their deep layers, which has been hypothesized to facilitate next-token prediction via linear…

Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for AI, with the key ability of in-context learning (ICL), where they can perform well on unseen tasks based on a brief series of task examples without necessitating any…

We investigate the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on sentence classification tasks with semantically-unrelated labels ("foo"/"bar"). We find intervening in only 1\% heads (named "in-context heads") significantly affects ICL accuracy…

In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…

Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require long-context understanding, but models continue to struggle with such tasks. We hypothesize that conventional next-token prediction training could contribute to this, because each…

In everyday conversations, humans can take on different roles and adapt their vocabulary to their chosen roles. We explore whether LLMs can take on, that is impersonate, different roles when they generate text in-context. We ask LLMs to…

In this work we present successor heads: attention heads that increment tokens with a natural ordering, such as numbers, months, and days. For example, successor heads increment 'Monday' into 'Tuesday'. We explain the successor head…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance improvement through in-context learning (ICL) by leveraging task-specific examples in the input. However, the mechanisms behind this improvement remain elusive. In this work, we…

Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few…

The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work…

Protein sequences are abundant in repeating segments, both as exact copies and as approximate segments with mutations. These repeats are important for protein structure and function, motivating decades of algorithmic work on repeat…

In-context learning is a key paradigm in large language models (LLMs) that enables them to generalize to new tasks and domains by simply prompting these models with a few exemplars without explicit parameter updates. Many attempts have been…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) answer visual questions by transferring information from images to text through a series of attention heads. While this image-to-text information flow is central to visual question answering, its…

We argue that in-context learning (ICL) predictably arises from standard self-supervised next-token pretraining, rather than being an exotic emergent property. This work establishes the foundational principles of this emergence by focusing…

Recent Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) demonstrate in-context learning ability to perform various functions based solely on the provided context, without updating model parameters. To fully utilize the in-context capabilities…

Most language models (LMs) are trained and applied in an autoregressive left-to-right fashion, assuming that the next token only depends on the preceding ones. However, this assumption ignores the potential benefits of using the full…

In-context learning is a recent paradigm in natural language understanding, where a large pre-trained language model (LM) observes a test instance and a few training examples as its input, and directly decodes the output without any update…

Recent work exploring the capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated their ability to act as general pattern machines by completing complex token sequences representing a wide array of tasks, including…

Pretraining Neural Language Models (NLMs) over a large corpus involves chunking the text into training examples, which are contiguous text segments of sizes processable by the neural architecture. We highlight a bias introduced by this…

Large language models (LLMs) like transformers demonstrate impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, allowing them to make predictions for new tasks based on prompt exemplars without parameter updates. While existing ICL theories…