Related papers: Optimality and NP-Hardness of Transformers in Lear…
Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformer-based architectures, have been recently shown to have the capacity to carry out in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a decision on a new input is made via a direct mapping of the input…
In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of transformer-based language models, enabling them to perform tasks by conditioning on a small number of examples presented at inference time, without any parameter updates.…
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…
Pre-trained large language models based on Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With just a few demonstration examples, the models can implement new tasks without any parameter updates. However, it…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to condition on a few in-context demonstrations (input-output examples of the underlying task) to generate the answer for a new query input, without updating parameters. Despite the…
In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…
The remarkable ability of transformers to learn new concepts solely by reading examples within the input prompt, termed in-context learning (ICL), is a crucial aspect of intelligent behavior. Here, we focus on understanding the learning…
In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to learn new tasks from examples in its input without any parameter updates. In contrast to previous theories of ICL relying on toy models and data settings, recently it has been…
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) has significantly expanded the general-purpose nature of large language models, allowing them to adapt to novel tasks using merely the inputted context. This has motivated a series of papers that analyze tractable…
Transformer training is notoriously difficult, requiring a careful design of optimizers and use of various heuristics. We make progress towards understanding the subtleties of training Transformers by carefully studying a simple yet…
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…
Transformer models have become foundational across a wide range of scientific and engineering domains due to their strong empirical performance. A key capability underlying their success is in-context learning (ICL): when presented with a…
In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent task/function vector in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed…
In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…
Recent work has demonstrated that transformers and linear attention models can perform in-context learning (ICL) on simple function classes, such as linear regression. In this paper, we empirically study how these two attention mechanisms…
Large-scale Transformer language models (LMs) trained solely on next-token prediction with web-scale data can solve a wide range of tasks after seeing just a few examples. The mechanism behind this capability, known as in-context learning…
Autoregressive transformers exhibit adaptive learning through in-context learning (ICL), which begs the question of how. Prior works have shown that transformers represent the ICL tasks as vectors in their representations. In this paper, we…
We propose Bayesian optimal sequential prediction as a new principle for understanding in-context learning (ICL). Unlike interpretations framing Transformers as performing implicit gradient descent, we formalize ICL as meta-learning over…
Large language models (LLM) have recently shown the extraordinary ability to perform unseen tasks based on few-shot examples provided as text, also known as in-context learning (ICL). While recent works have attempted to understand the…