Related papers: Transformers are almost optimal metalearners for l…
Large language models (LLMs) are powerful models that can learn concepts at the inference stage via in-context learning (ICL). While theoretical studies, e.g., \cite{zhang2023trained}, attempt to explain the mechanism of ICL, they assume…
In-context learning (ICL) is a hallmark capability of transformers, through which trained models learn to adapt to new tasks by leveraging information from the input context. Prior work has shown that ICL emerges in transformers due to the…
Recent studies have shown that Transformers can perform in-context reinforcement learning (RL) by imitating existing RL algorithms, enabling sample-efficient adaptation to unseen tasks without parameter updates. However, these models also…
Transformers often fail to learn generalizable algorithms, instead relying on brittle heuristics. Using graph connectivity as a testbed, we explain this phenomenon both theoretically and empirically. We consider a simplified Transformer…
Transformer, originally devised for natural language processing, has also attested significant success in computer vision. Thanks to its super expressive power, researchers are investigating ways to deploy transformers to reinforcement…
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…
Transformers exhibit compositional reasoning on sequences not observed during training, a capability often attributed to in-context learning (ICL) and skill composition. We investigate this phenomenon using the Random Hierarchy Model (RHM),…
In-context learning (ICL) is a valuable capability exhibited by Transformers pretrained on diverse sequence tasks. However, previous studies have observed that ICL often conflicts with the model's inherent in-weight learning (IWL) ability.…
The recently introduced TabPFN pretrains an In-Context Learning (ICL) transformer on synthetic data to perform tabular data classification. In this work, we extend TabPFN to the fine-tuning setting, resulting in a significant performance…
Transformers have revolutionized machine learning with their simple yet effective architecture. Pre-training Transformers on massive text datasets from the Internet has led to unmatched generalization for natural language understanding…
The rapid progress seen in terms of large-scale generative AI is largely based on the attention mechanism. It is conversely non-trivial to conceive small-scale applications for which attention-based architectures outperform traditional…
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…
Typically, a modern reinforcement learning (RL) agent solves a task by updating its neural network parameters to adapt its policy to the task. Recently, it has been observed that some RL agents can solve a wide range of new…
In this work we introduce KERNELIZED TRANSFORMER, a generic, scalable, data driven framework for learning the kernel function in Transformers. Our framework approximates the Transformer kernel as a dot product between spectral feature maps…
Our paper challenges claims from prior research that transformer-based models, when learning in context, implicitly implement standard learning algorithms. We present empirical evidence inconsistent with this view and provide a mathematical…
Transfer learning (TL) leverages previously obtained knowledge to learn new tasks efficiently and has been used to train deep learning (DL) models with limited amount of data. When TL is applied to DL, pretrained (teacher) models are…
Pre-trained large language models have demonstrated a strong ability to learn from context, known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite a surge of recent applications that leverage such capabilities, it is by no means clear, at least…
Humans and animals show remarkable learning efficiency, adapting to new environments with minimal experience. This capability is not well captured by standard reinforcement learning algorithms that rely on incremental value updates. Rapid…
Transformer-based large language models have achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. However, they often struggle with seemingly easy tasks like arithmetic despite their vast capabilities. This…
The emergent ability of Large Language Models to use a small number of examples to learn to perform in novel domains and tasks, also called in-context learning (ICL). In this work, we show that a much smaller model can be trained to perform…