Related papers: On the Emergence of Induction Heads for In-Context…

Recent works have suggested that In-Context Learning (ICL) operates in dual modes, i.e. task retrieval (remember learned patterns from pre-training) and task learning (inference-time ''learning'' from demonstrations). However, disentangling…

Large language models show a surprising in-context learning ability -- being able to use a prompt to form a prediction for a query, yet without additional training, in stark contrast to old-fashioned supervised learning. Providing a…

In-context learning (ICL) allows some autoregressive models to solve tasks via next-token prediction and without needing further training. This has led to claims about these model's ability to solve (learn) unseen tasks with only a few…

We study in-context learning (ICL) of linear regression in a deep linear self-attention model, characterizing how performance depends on various computational and statistical resources (width, depth, number of training steps, batch size and…

We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…

Recent interest has surged in employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for machine translation (MT) via in-context learning (ICL) (Vilar et al., 2023). Most prior studies primarily focus on optimizing translation quality, with limited…

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) enables large pre-trained language models (PLMs) to make predictions for unseen inputs without updating parameters. Despite its potential, ICL's effectiveness heavily relies on the quality,…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. However, the underlying working mechanism of ICL remains poorly understood. Recent research presents two conflicting views on ICL: One emphasizes the…

In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent task/function vector in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed…

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether…

Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…

In-context learning (ICL) has proven to be a significant capability with the advancement of Large Language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks without…

Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining and increased test-time compute. Despite surpassing human performance in several domains, these models remain fundamentally limited in continuous operation,…

Ever since the development of GPT-3 in the natural language processing (NLP) field, in-context learning (ICL) has played an essential role in utilizing large language models (LLMs). By presenting the LM utterance-label demonstrations at the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can sometimes degrade into repetitive loops, persistently generating identical word sequences. Because repetition is rare in natural human language, its frequent occurrence across diverse tasks and contexts in…

Encoder transformer models compress information from all tokens in a sequence into a single [CLS] token to represent global context. This approach risks diluting fine-grained or hierarchical features, leading to information loss in…

Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…

What is the relationship between model architecture and the ability to perform in-context learning? In this empirical study, we take the first steps toward answering this question. We evaluate thirteen model architectures capable of causal…

In-context learning (ICL) -- the capacity of a model to infer and apply abstract patterns from examples provided within its input -- has been extensively studied in large language models trained for next-token prediction on human text. In…

We investigate the mechanisms that arise when transformers are trained to solve arithmetic on sequences where tokens are variables whose meaning is determined only through their interactions in-context. While prior work has studied…