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Transformers have significantly impacted domains like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics, where they improve performance compared to other neural networks. This survey explores how transformers are used in…
The compositional generalization abilities of neural models have been sought after for human-like linguistic competence. The popular method to evaluate such abilities is to assess the models' input-output behavior. However, that does not…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we study the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical…
This paper focuses on understanding how the generalization error scales with the amount of the training data for deep neural networks (DNNs). Existing techniques in statistical learning require computation of capacity measures, such as VC…
We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…
In recent years, transformer-based models have revolutionized deep learning, particularly in sequence modeling. To better understand this phenomenon, there is a growing interest in using Markov input processes to study transformers.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have benefited enormously from scaling, yet these gains are bounded by five fundamental limitations: (1) hallucination, (2) context compression, (3) reasoning degradation, (4) retrieval fragility, and (5)…
Grokking is the intriguing phenomenon where a model learns to generalize long after it has fit the training data. We show both analytically and numerically that grokking can surprisingly occur in linear networks performing linear tasks in a…
Existing generalization theories of supervised learning typically take a holistic approach and provide bounds for the expected generalization over the whole data distribution, which implicitly assumes that the model generalizes similarly…
The successful training of deep neural networks requires addressing challenges such as overfitting, numerical instabilities leading to divergence, and increasing variance in the residual stream. A common solution is to apply regularization…
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…
Search is an ability foundational in many important tasks, and recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) struggle to perform search robustly. It is unknown whether this inability is due to a lack of data, insufficient…
Understanding why trained Transformers generalize well is a fundamental problem in modern machine learning theory, and complexity-based generalization bounds provide a principled way to study this question. While existing norm-based bounds…
In this paper, we propose a ``Generalization Stress Test" to assess Large Language Models' (LLMs) generalization ability under slight and controlled perturbations, including option length, problem types, and irrelevant noun replacements. We…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses…
The Transformer is widely used in natural language processing tasks. To train a Transformer however, one usually needs a carefully designed learning rate warm-up stage, which is shown to be crucial to the final performance but will slow…
Motivated by the efficiency and rapid convergence of pre-trained models for solving downstream tasks, this paper extensively studies the impact of Continual Learning (CL) models as pre-trainers. In both supervised and unsupervised CL, we…
Continual learning (CL), which aims to learn a sequence of tasks, has attracted significant recent attention. However, most work has focused on the experimental performance of CL, and theoretical studies of CL are still limited. In…
Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over…