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Recent research in the field of machine learning has increasingly focused on the memorization capacity of Transformers, but how efficient they are is not yet well understood. We demonstrate that Transformers can memorize labels with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Tokio Kajitsuka , Issei Sato

Transformers have become pivotal in Natural Language Processing, demonstrating remarkable success in applications like Machine Translation and Summarization. Given their widespread adoption, several works have attempted to analyze the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Swaroop Nath , Harshad Khadilkar , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

LLMs demonstrate significant inference capacities in complicated machine learning tasks, using the Transformer model as its backbone. Motivated by the limited understanding of such models on the unsupervised learning problems, we study the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Yihan He , Hong-Yu Chen , Yuan Cao , Jianqing Fan , Han Liu

Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Nuri Mert Vural , Alberto Bietti , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Denny Wu

This paper presents a tractable algorithm for estimating an unknown Lipschitz function from noisy observations and establishes an upper bound on its convergence rate. The approach extends max-affine methods from convex shape-restricted…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-20 Gábor Balázs

The Normalized Transformer, or nGPT (arXiv:2410.01131) achieves impressive training speedups and does not require weight decay or learning rate warmup. However, despite having hyperparameters that explicitly scale with model size, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Boris Shigida , Boris Hanin , Andrey Gromov

We study representations of data from an arbitrary metric space $\mathcal{X}$ in the space of univariate Gaussian mixtures with a transport metric (Delon and Desolneux 2020). We derive embedding guarantees for feature maps implemented by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Anastasis Kratsios , Valentin Debarnot , Ivan Dokmanić

Transformers have achieved remarkable successes across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundation of their model efficiency remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate how the model parameters -- mainly attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ruoxi Yu , Haotian Jiang , Jingpu Cheng , Penghao Yu , Qianxiao Li , Zhong Li

We find limits to the Transformer architecture for language modeling and show it has a universal prediction property in an information-theoretic sense. We further analyze performance in non-asymptotic data regimes to understand the role of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Sourya Basu , Moulik Choraria , Lav R. Varshney

We provide general adaptive upper bounds for estimating nonparametric functionals based on second order U-statistics arising from finite dimensional approximation of the infinite dimensional models. We then provide examples of functionals…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-06-07 Lin Liu , Rajarshi Mukherjee , James Robins , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

One of the arguments to explain the success of deep learning is the powerful approximation capacity of deep neural networks. Such capacity is generally accompanied by the explosive growth of the number of parameters, which, in turn, leads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-15 Zuowei Shen , Haizhao Yang , Shijun Zhang

Transformer-based architectures achieved breakthrough performance in natural language processing and computer vision, yet they remain inferior to simpler linear baselines in multivariate long-term forecasting. To better understand this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Romain Ilbert , Ambroise Odonnat , Vasilii Feofanov , Aladin Virmaux , Giuseppe Paolo , Themis Palpanas , Ievgen Redko

Estimating linear, mean-square continuous functionals is a pivotal challenge in statistics. In high-dimensional contexts, this estimation is often performed under the assumption of exact model sparsity, meaning that only a small number of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-04 Jelena Bradic , Victor Chernozhukov , Whitney K. Newey , Yinchu Zhu

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Tianyi Ma , Tengyao Wang , Richard J. Samworth

We focus on semiparametric regression that has played a central role in statistics, and exploit the powerful learning ability of deep neural networks (DNNs) while enabling statistical inference on parameters of interest that offers…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-04-29 Shunxing Yan , Ziyuan Chen , Fang Yao

Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

Recent research has explored the memorization capacity of multi-head attention, but these findings are constrained by unrealistic limitations on the context size. We present a novel proof for language-based Transformers that extends the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Léo Dana , Muni Sreenivas Pydi , Yann Chevaleyre

We investigate the fundamental limits of transformer-based foundation models, extending our analysis to include Visual Autoregressive (VAR) transformers. VAR represents a big step toward generating images using a novel, scalable,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Yifang Chen , Xiaoyu Li , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

We generalize the notion of average Lipschitz smoothness proposed by Ashlagi et al. (COLT 2021) by extending it to H\"older smoothness. This measure of the "effective smoothness" of a function is sensitive to the underlying distribution and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Steve Hanneke , Aryeh Kontorovich , Guy Kornowski

Multi-layer feedforward networks have been used to approximate a wide range of nonlinear functions. An important and fundamental problem is to understand the learnability of a network model through its statistical risk, or the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Gen Li , Jie Ding