Related papers: Distinct mechanisms underlying in-context learning…
In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…
In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters. Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various…
In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine…
Phase transitions mark qualitative reorganizations of collective behavior, yet identifying their boundaries remains challenging whenever analytic solutions are absent and conventional simulations fail. Here we introduce learnability as a…
Large language models are capable of in-context learning, the ability to perform new tasks at test time using a handful of input-output examples, without parameter updates. We develop a universal approximation theory to elucidate how…
The transformer is a neural network component that can be used to learn useful representations of sequences or sets of data-points. The transformer has driven recent advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and…
We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…
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…
The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…
Recent progress has rapidly advanced our understanding of the mechanisms underlying in-context learning in modern attention-based neural networks. However, existing results focus exclusively on unimodal data; in contrast, the theoretical…
Neural network methods are increasingly applied to solve phase transition problems, particularly in identifying critical points in non-equilibrium phase transitions, offering more convenience compared to traditional methods. In this paper,…
Transformers have achieved extraordinary success in modern machine learning due to their excellent ability to handle sequential data, especially in next-token prediction (NTP) tasks. However, the theoretical understanding of their…
Despite the empirical success of prompt tuning in adapting pretrained language models to new tasks, theoretical analyses of its capabilities remain limited. Existing theoretical work primarily addresses universal approximation properties,…
In-context learning (ICL) is a hallmark capability of transformers, through which trained models learn to adapt to new tasks by leveraging information from the input context. Prior work has shown that ICL emerges in transformers due to the…
Recently introduced by some of the authors, the in-context identification paradigm aims at estimating, offline and based on synthetic data, a meta-model that describes the behavior of a whole class of systems. Once trained, this meta-model…
Understanding the training dynamics of transformers is important to explain the impressive capabilities behind large language models. In this work, we study the dynamics of training a shallow transformer on a task of recognizing…
Large language models (LLMs) are powerful models that can learn concepts at the inference stage via in-context learning (ICL). While theoretical studies, e.g., \cite{zhang2023trained}, attempt to explain the mechanism of ICL, they assume…
Transformers have demonstrated a strong ability for in-context learning (ICL), enabling models to solve previously unseen tasks using only example input output pairs provided at inference time. While prior theoretical work has established…
In-context learning has been recognized as a key factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). It refers to the model's ability to learn patterns on the fly from provided in-context examples in the prompt during inference. Previous…
We investigate the ability of transformers to perform in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL), where a model must infer and execute learning algorithms from trajectory data without parameter updates. We show that a linear self-attention…