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Large language models exhibit sophisticated capabilities, yet understanding how they work internally remains a central challenge. A fundamental obstacle is that training selects for behavior, not circuitry, so many weight configurations can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Joshua S. Schiffman

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for easily adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to various tasks. However, our understanding of how ICL works remains limited. We explore a simple model of ICL in a controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Omar Naim , Guilhem Fouilhé , Nicholas Asher

Large language models can solve tasks that were not present in the training set. This capability is believed to be due to in-context learning and skill composition. In this work, we study the emergence of in-context learning and skill…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tianyu He , Darshil Doshi , Aritra Das , Andrey Gromov

Transformer-based language models have achieved significant success; however, their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque due to the complexity of non-linear interactions and high-dimensional operations. While previous studies have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Lin Zhang , Lijie Hu , Di Wang

Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wei Shi , Yuan Cao

Transformer models are now a cornerstone in natural language processing. Yet, explaining their decisions remains a challenge. It was shown recently that the same model trained on the same data with a different randomness can lead to very…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Romain Loncour , Jérémie Bogaert , François-Xavier Standaert

Commonly-used transformer language models depend on a tokenization schema which sets an unchangeable subword vocabulary prior to pre-training, destined to be applied to all downstream tasks regardless of domain shift, novel word formations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Yuval Pinter , Amanda Stent , Mark Dredze , Jacob Eisenstein

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Guangyu Li , Meng Ding , Lijie Hu

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success across language, vision, and multimodal tasks, and there is growing demand for them to address in-context compositional learning tasks. In these tasks, models solve the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Wei Chen , Jingxi Yu , Zichen Miao , Qiang Qiu

Prior work on in-context copying has shown the existence of induction heads, which attend to and promote individual tokens during copying. In this work we discover a new type of induction head: concept-level induction heads, which copy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Sheridan Feucht , Eric Todd , Byron Wallace , David Bau

The ability to perform arithmetic tasks is a remarkable trait of human intelligence and might form a critical component of more complex reasoning tasks. In this work, we investigate if the surface form of a number has any influence on how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Rodrigo Nogueira , Zhiying Jiang , Jimmy Lin

Many neural network architectures are known to be Turing Complete, and can thus, in principle implement arbitrary algorithms. However, Transformers are unique in that they can implement gradient-based learning algorithms under simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Xiang Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Suvrit Sra

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Asif Shahriar , Rifat Shahriyar , M Saifur Rahman

Applying machine learning algorithms to large-scale, text-based corpora (embeddings) presents a unique opportunity to investigate at scale how human semantic knowledge is organized and how people use it to judge fundamental relationships,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Marius Cătălin Iordan , Tyler Giallanza , Cameron T. Ellis , Nicole M. Beckage , Jonathan D. Cohen

Going beyond mimicking limited human experiences, recent studies show initial evidence that, like humans, large language models (LLMs) are capable of improving their abilities purely by self-correction, i.e., correcting previous responses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Yifei Wang , Yuyang Wu , Zeming Wei , Stefanie Jegelka , Yisen Wang

Transformers have emerged as the dominant architecture in the field of deep learning, with a broad range of applications and remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. While not yet fully understood, ICL has already proved to be an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Arik Reuter , Tim G. J. Rudner , Vincent Fortuin , David Rügamer

Representation learning plays a central role in structuring internal embeddings to capture the statistical properties of language, influencing the coherence and contextual consistency of generated text. Statistical Coherence Alignment is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Jonathan Gale , Godfrey Aldington , Harriet Thistlewood , Thomas Tattershall , Basil Wentworth , Vincent Enoasmo

In this paper, we propose a novel design for AI-native goal-oriented communications, exploiting transformer neural networks under dynamic inference constraints on bandwidth and computation. Transformers have become the standard architecture…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Alessio Devoto , Simone Petruzzi , Jary Pomponi , Paolo Di Lorenzo , Simone Scardapane

Many recent language models (LMs) of Transformers family exhibit so-called in-context learning (ICL) ability, manifested in the LMs' ability to modulate their function by a task described in a natural language input. Previous work curating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Michal Štefánik , Marek Kadlčík

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Patrick Kahardipraja , Reduan Achtibat , Thomas Wiegand , Wojciech Samek , Sebastian Lapuschkin