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We study how large language models (LLMs) reason about memorized knowledge through simple binary relations such as equality ($=$), inequality ($<$), and inclusion ($\subset$). Unlike in-context reasoning, the axioms (e.g., $a < b, b < c$)…
Transformer based models have shown remarkable capabilities in sequence learning across a wide range of tasks, often performing well on specific task by leveraging input-output examples. Despite their empirical success, a comprehensive…
Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions. We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate…
The Transformer architecture has become prominent in developing large causal language models. However, mechanisms to explain its capabilities are not well understood. Focused on the training process, here we establish a meta-learning view…
Transformers are neural networks that revolutionized natural language processing and machine learning. They process sequences of inputs, like words, using a mechanism called self-attention, which is trained via masked language modeling…
Pretraining on large, semantically rich datasets is key for developing language models. Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that even synthetic data, generated procedurally through simple semantic-free algorithms, can yield some of the…
Visual reasoning is dominated by end-to-end neural networks scaled to billions of model parameters and training examples. However, even the largest models struggle with compositional reasoning, generalization, fine-grained spatial and…
What if artificial intelligence could not only solve problems for which it was trained but also learn to teach itself to solve new problems (i.e., meta-learn)? In this study, we demonstrate that a pre-trained transformer fine-tuned with…
In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…
Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…
In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…
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…
Humans excel at applying learned behavior to unlearned situations. A crucial component of this generalization behavior is our ability to compose/decompose a whole into reusable parts, an attribute known as compositionality. One of the…
The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remains poorly understood despite its consistent effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples. To clarify and improve these…
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…
Transformer-based architectures have been the subject of research aimed at understanding their overparameterization and the non-uniform importance of their layers. Applying these approaches to Automatic Speech Recognition, we demonstrate…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understandably, a swath of research has been dedicated to uncovering…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) based on transformer architectures are typically described through collections of architectural components and training procedures, obscuring their underlying computational structure. This review article…