Related papers: Directional Optimization Asymmetry in Transformers…
In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of large pretrained transformers, enabling them to solve new tasks implicit in example input-output pairs without any gradient updates. Despite its practical success, the…
Despite progress across a broad range of applications, Transformers have limited success in systematic generalization. The situation is especially frustrating in the case of algorithmic tasks, where they often fail to find intuitive…
We investigate the in-context learning capabilities of transformers for the $d$-dimensional mixture of linear regression model, providing theoretical insights into their existence, generalization bounds, and training dynamics. Specifically,…
In order for a bimanual robot to manipulate an object that is held by both hands, it must construct motion plans such that the transformation between its end effectors remains fixed. This amounts to complicated nonlinear equality…
Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…
Modern robotics is gravitating toward increasingly collaborative human robot interaction. Tools such as acceleration policies can naturally support the realization of reactive, adaptive, and compliant robots. These tools require us to model…
State-of-the-art neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples; they can easily misclassify inputs that are imperceptibly different than their training and test data. In this work, we establish that the use of cross-entropy loss…
We study in-context learning problems where a Transformer is pretrained on tasks drawn from a mixture distribution $\pi=\sum_{\alpha\in\mathcal{A}} \lambda_{\alpha} \pi_{\alpha}$, called the pretraining prior, in which each mixture…
As LLMs evolve, significant effort is spent on manually crafting prompts. While existing prompt optimization methods automate this process, they rely solely on learning from incorrect samples, leading to a sub-optimal performance.…
For sparse, structured reinforcement-learning tasks with semantic reward-function interfaces, LLM-generated reward shaping is better framed as debugging than one-shot generation. We study PPO-trained agents using MiniGrid as core evaluation…
This survey (re)introduces reinforcement learning methods to economists. The curse of dimensionality limits how far exact dynamic programming can be effectively applied, forcing us to rely on suitably "small" problems or our ability to…
We train hierarchical Transformers on the task of synthesizing hardware circuits directly out of high-level logical specifications in linear-time temporal logic (LTL). The LTL synthesis problem is a well-known algorithmic challenge with a…
While fine-tuning pre-trained models for downstream classification is the conventional paradigm in NLP, often task-specific nuances may not get captured in the resultant models. Specifically, for tasks that take two inputs and require the…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit in-context learning abilities which enable the same model to perform several tasks without any task-specific training. In contrast, traditional adaptation approaches, such as fine-tuning, modify the…
Contrastive steering has been shown as a simple and effective method to adjust the generative behavior of LLMs at inference time. It uses examples of prompt responses with and without a trait to identify a direction in an intermediate…
Learning the inverse dynamics of soft continuum robots remains challenging due to high-dimensional nonlinearities and complex actuation coupling. Conventional feedback-based controllers often suffer from control chattering due to corrective…
Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…
Moral benchmarks for LLMs typically score models on context-free prompts, implicitly treating the measured choice rate as stable. We test this assumption with a direction-flipped influence audit: for each scenario, we compare a baseline…
Large language models based on the Transformer architecture have demonstrated impressive capabilities to learn in context. However, existing theoretical studies on how this phenomenon arises are limited to the dynamics of a single layer of…
Adaptive test-time compute for LLM agents aims to invoke extra computation only when it improves performance. Existing methods typically use confidence-, uncertainty-, or difficulty-based gates, assuming a fixed direction from the gating…