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Transformers have demonstrated remarkable success across various applications. However, the success of transformers have not been understood in theory. In this work, we give a case study of how transformers can be trained to learn a classic…
Modern machine learning requires system designers to specify aspects of the learning pipeline, such as losses, architectures, and optimizers. Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, instead aims to learn those aspects, and promises to unlock…
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…
Mixture models arise in many regression problems, but most methods have seen limited adoption partly due to these algorithms' highly-tailored and model-specific nature. On the other hand, transformers are flexible, neural sequence models…
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…
Transformers exhibit in-context learning (ICL): the ability to use novel information presented in the context without additional weight updates. Recent work shows that ICL emerges when models are trained on a sufficiently diverse set of…
We explore the capability of transformers to address endogeneity in in-context linear regression. Our main finding is that transformers inherently possess a mechanism to handle endogeneity effectively using instrumental variables (IV).…
Sequence modelling requires determining which past tokens are causally relevant from the context and their importance: a process inherent to the attention layers in transformers, yet whose underlying learned mechanisms remain poorly…
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their…
Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in…
Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning capabilities, prompting extensive research into its underlying mechanisms. Recent studies have suggested that Transformers can implement first-order optimization…
In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of In-Context Learning (ICL) by addressing several open questions: (a) What type of ICL estimator is learned by large language models? (b) What is a proper performance metric for ICL and what…
In-context learning refers to the ability of a model to condition on a prompt sequence consisting of in-context examples (input-output pairs corresponding to some task) along with a new query input, and generate the corresponding output.…
Training autonomous agents that can learn new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations is a long-standing problem in machine learning. Recently, transformers have been shown to learn new language or vision tasks without any weight…
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…
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…
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),…
Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in language modeling tasks. However, the reasons behind their tremendous success are still unclear. In this paper, towards a better understanding, we train a Transformer model on a…
In-context learning (ICL) is a central capability of Transformer models, but the structures in data that enable its emergence and govern its robustness remain poorly understood. In this work, we study how the structure of pretraining tasks…
In-Context Learning (ICL) has been a powerful emergent property of large language models that has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In contrast to regular gradient-based learning, ICL is highly interpretable and does not…