Related papers: Predicting the Emergence of Induction Heads in Lan…

In-context learning is a powerful emergent ability in transformer models. Prior work in mechanistic interpretability has identified a circuit element that may be critical for in-context learning -- the induction head (IH), which performs a…

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for natural language processing. Part of their success is owed to a remarkable capability known as in-context learning (ICL): they can acquire and apply novel associations solely from their…

Transformer models exhibit in-context learning: the ability to accurately predict the response to a novel query based on illustrative examples in the input sequence. In-context learning contrasts with traditional in-weights learning of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning, the ability to use information provided as context to improve prediction of future tokens. Induction heads have been argued to play a crucial role for in-context learning in…

Large language models are able to exploit in-context learning to access external knowledge beyond their training data through retrieval-augmentation. While promising, its inner workings remain unclear. In this work, we shed light on the…

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong in-context learning capabilities, but how they track and retrieve information from context remains underexplored. Drawing on the free recall paradigm in cognitive science (where participants…

"Induction heads" are attention heads that implement a simple algorithm to complete token sequences like [A][B] ... [A] -> [B]. In this work, we present preliminary and indirect evidence for a hypothesis that induction heads might…

Large language models have the ability to generate text that mimics patterns in their inputs. We introduce a simple Markov Chain sequence modeling task in order to study how this in-context learning (ICL) capability emerges. In our setting,…

Induction head mechanism is a part of the computational circuits for in-context learning (ICL) that enable large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without fine-tuning. Most existing work explains the training dynamics behind…

Induction heads are attention heads that perform inductive copying by matching patterns from earlier context and copying their continuations verbatim. As models develop induction heads, they experience a sharp drop in training loss, a…

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…

This paper investigates the relationship between large language models' (LLMs) ability to recognize repetitive input patterns and their performance on in-context learning (ICL). In contrast to prior work that has primarily focused on…

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…

Large language models (LLMs) based on transformer architectures are typically described through collections of architectural components and training procedures, obscuring their underlying computational structure. This review article…

Large language models leverage both parametric knowledge acquired during pretraining and in-context knowledge provided at inference time. Crucially, when these sources conflict, models arbitrate based on their internal confidence,…

Prior work on language model pre-training has explored different architectures and learning objectives, but differences in data, hyperparameters and evaluation make a principled comparison difficult. In this work, we focus on…

Language models have been shown to perform better with an increase in scale on a wide variety of tasks via the in-context learning paradigm. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the ability of a large language model to…

Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is the core computational primitive underlying modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, MHA suffers from a fundamental linear scaling limitation: $H$ attention heads produce exactly $H$ independent attention…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations in the prompt. Two different mechanisms have been proposed to explain ICL: induction…