Related papers: Transformers are almost optimal metalearners for l…
In-context learning (ICL) adapts LLMs by providing demonstrations without fine-tuning the model parameters; however, it does not differentiate between demonstrations and quadratically increases the complexity of Transformer LLMs, exhausting…
Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…
A central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is to learn models that generalize beyond the tasks on which they are trained, a goal traditionally pursued through multi-task and meta RL. Recently, transformer architectures have emerged…
Task vectors offer a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles…
In-context learning has been recognized as a key factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). It refers to the model's ability to learn patterns on the fly from provided in-context examples in the prompt during inference. Previous…
Large transformer models trained on diverse datasets have shown a remarkable ability to learn in-context, achieving high few-shot performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained to solve. In this paper, we study the in-context…
This paper investigates the learning theory of Transformer networks for regression tasks on the compact Euclidean domain $[0,1]^d$ and $d$-dimensional compact Riemannian manifolds. We propose a novel constructive approximation framework for…
We study the in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of pretrained Transformers in the setting of nonlinear regression. Specifically, we focus on a random Transformer with a nonlinear MLP head where the first layer is randomly initialized…
Metalearning and multitask learning are two frameworks for solving a group of related learning tasks more efficiently than we could hope to solve each of the individual tasks on their own. In multitask learning, we are given a fixed set of…
The emergence of In-Context Learning (ICL) in LLMs remains a remarkable phenomenon that is partially understood. To explain ICL, recent studies have created theoretical connections to Gradient Descent (GD). We ask, do such connections hold…
Large transformer models have been shown to be capable of performing in-context learning. By using examples in a prompt as well as a query, they are capable of performing tasks such as few-shot, one-shot, or zero-shot learning to output the…
Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…
This paper investigates approximation-theoretic aspects of the in-context learning capability of the transformers in representing a family of noisy linear dynamical systems. Our first theoretical result establishes an upper bound on the…
This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…
Transformers have demonstrated effectiveness in in-context solving data-fitting problems from various (latent) models, as reported by Garg et al. However, the absence of an inherent iterative structure in the transformer architecture…
Transformers have achieved great success in recent years. Interestingly, transformers have shown particularly strong in-context learning capability -- even without fine-tuning, they are still able to solve unseen tasks well purely based on…
Transformers excel through content-addressable retrieval and the ability to exploit contexts of, in principle, unbounded length. We recast associative memory at the level of probability measures, treating a context as a distribution over…
A meta-model is trained on a distribution of similar tasks such that it learns an algorithm that can quickly adapt to a novel task with only a handful of labeled examples. Most of current meta-learning methods assume that the meta-training…
Recent research has shown that Transformers with linear attention are capable of in-context learning (ICL) by implementing a linear estimator through gradient descent steps. However, the existing results on the optimization landscape apply…
Learning a model of a stochastic setting often involves learning both general structure rules and specific properties of the instance. This paper investigates the interplay between learning the general and the specific in various learning…