Related papers: Optimal In-context Adaptivity and Distributional R…
The performance of machine learning models under distribution shift has been the focus of the community in recent years. Most of current methods have been proposed to improve the robustness to distribution shift from the algorithmic…
While task-specific finetuning of pretrained networks has led to significant empirical advances in NLP, the large size of networks makes finetuning difficult to deploy in multi-task, memory-constrained settings. We propose diff pruning as a…
This paper studies the fast adaptive beamforming for the multiuser multiple-input single-output downlink. Existing deep learning-based approaches assume that training and testing channels follow the same distribution which causes task…
We theoretically justify the recent empirical finding of [Teh et al., 2025] that a transformer pretrained on synthetically generated data achieves strong performance on empirical Bayes (EB) problems. We take an indirect approach to this…
Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn from multiple training tasks the ability to adapt efficiently to unseen test tasks. Despite the success, existing meta-RL algorithms are known to be sensitive to the task distribution…
LLMs demonstrate significant inference capacities in complicated machine learning tasks, using the Transformer model as its backbone. Motivated by the limited understanding of such models on the unsupervised learning problems, we study the…
Finetuning pretrained models occurs in a low-dimensional subspace of the full parameter space. Prior work has focused on characterizing this optimization subspace, but largely ignored the complementary question: why do certain directions…
Transformers have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of domains. While their ability to perform reinforcement learning in-context has been established both theoretically and empirically, their behavior in…
Diffusion models have attained prominence for their ability to synthesize a probability distribution for a given dataset via a diffusion process, enabling the generation of new data points with high fidelity. However, diffusion processes…
The growth of global consumption has motivated important applications of deep learning to smart manufacturing and machine health monitoring. In particular, analyzing vibration data offers great potential to extract meaningful insights into…
Large language models are capable of in-context learning, the ability to perform new tasks at test time using a handful of input-output examples, without parameter updates. We develop a universal approximation theory to elucidate how…
Although transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities for in-context learning (ICL) in practice, theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanism that allows transformers to perform ICL is still in its infancy. This work aims…
Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the internal workings of transformers are not well understood. We aim to better understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the layers of a…
We consider small-data, large-scale decision problems in which a firm must make many operational decisions simultaneously (e.g., across a large product portfolio) while observing only a few, potentially noisy, data points per instance.…
Large language models adapt to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates. Current theoretical explanations for this capability assume test tasks are drawn from a distribution similar to that seen during…
We introduce a constrained optimization framework for training transformers that behave like optimization descent algorithms. Specifically, we enforce layerwise descent constraints on the objective function and replace standard empirical…
Transformers can efficiently learn in-context from example demonstrations. Most existing theoretical analyses studied the in-context learning (ICL) ability of transformers for linear function classes, where it is typically shown that the…
We consider the problem of learning classification trees that are robust to distribution shifts between training and testing/deployment data. This problem arises frequently in high stakes settings such as public health and social work where…
Transfer learning is beneficial by allowing the expressive features of models pretrained on large-scale datasets to be finetuned for the target task of smaller, more domain-specific datasets. However, there is a concern that these…
The generalization ability of machine learning models degrades significantly when the test distribution shifts away from the training distribution. We investigate the problem of training models that are robust to shifts caused by changes in…