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Transformer-based multimodal large language models often exhibit in-context learning (ICL) abilities. Motivated by this phenomenon, we ask: how do transformers learn to associate information across modalities from in-context examples? We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yiran Huang , Karsten Roth , Quentin Bouniot , Wenjia Xu , Zeynep Akata

Pre-trained transformers exhibit the capability of adapting to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL), where they efficiently utilize a limited set of prompts without explicit model optimization. The canonical communication problem 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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Ayush Goel , Arjun Kohli , Sarvagya Somvanshi

In-context learning (ICL) allows transformer-based language models that are pre-trained on general text to quickly learn a specific task with a few "task demonstrations" without updating their parameters, significantly boosting their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Zijian Zhou , Xiaoqiang Lin , Xinyi Xu , Alok Prakash , Daniela Rus , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Baturay Saglam , Xinyang Hu , Zhuoran Yang , Dionysis Kalogerias , Amin Karbasi

There has been significant recent interest in understanding the capacity of Transformers for in-context learning (ICL), yet most theory focuses on supervised settings with explicitly labeled pairs. In practice, Transformers often perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jiashuo Fan , Paul Rosu , Aaron T. Wang , Zeyu Michael Li , Lawrence Carin , Xiang Cheng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yifan Hao , Chenlu Ye , Chi Han , Tong Zhang

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for natural language processing. Part of their success is owed to a remarkable capability known as in-context learning (ICL): they can acquire and apply novel associations solely from their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Tiberiu Musat , Tiago Pimentel , Lorenzo Noci , Alessandro Stolfo , Mrinmaya Sachan , Thomas Hofmann

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Juno Kim , Taiji Suzuki

Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiuqi Wang , Ethan Blaser , Hadi Daneshmand , Shangtong Zhang

Understanding the internal mechanisms of GPT-style transformers, particularly their capacity to perform in-context learning (ICL), is critical for advancing AI alignment and interpretability. In-context learning allows transformers to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Samarth Bhargav , Alexander Gu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Chi Han , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhao , Heng Ji

Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yuxuan Li , James L. McClelland

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Minhak Song , Chulhee Yun , Ali Jadbabaie , Suvrit Sra

Transformers are deep architectures that define "in-context mappings" which enable predicting new tokens based on a given set of tokens (such as a prompt in NLP applications or a set of patches for a vision transformer). In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Takashi Furuya , Maarten V. de Hoop , Gabriel Peyré

We study theoretical guarantees for solving linear systems in-context using a linear transformer architecture. For in-domain generalization, we provide neural scaling laws that bound the generalization error in terms of the number of tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Frank Cole , Yulong Lu , Wuzhe Xu , Tianhao Zhang

In recent years, deep learning has facilitated the creation of wireless receivers capable of functioning effectively in conditions that challenge traditional model-based designs. Leveraging programmable hardware architectures, deep…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Matteo Zecchin , Tomer Raviv , Dileep Kalathil , Krishna Narayanan , Nir Shlezinger , Osvaldo Simeone

Transformers serve as the foundational architecture for large language and video generation models, such as GPT, BERT, SORA and their successors. Empirical studies have demonstrated that real-world data and learning tasks exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhaiming Shen , Alex Havrilla , Rongjie Lai , Alexander Cloninger , Wenjing Liao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Xinbo Wu , Lav R. Varshney
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