arXiv Machine Learning

Sequential Correlations Change In-Context Learning: Effective Context Length and Architectural Mismatch

arXiv:2607. 03660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern sequence models have a striking capacity for in-context learning (ICL); they can perform new tasks based only on examples given in the prompt.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Transformers as Cross-Task Learners: Shared Structure Drives Sample Efficiency in In-Context Learning

Transformers can learn broad families of tasks during pretraining and adapt to unseen tasks from a short prompt, but a rigorous understanding of this capability is limited. This paper studies how shared cross‑task structure influences the sample complexity of in‑context learning (ICL) by characterizing task‑space complexity through covering numbers, yielding a set of anchor functions that localize unseen tasks and predict responses. The authors construct a Transformer with Softmax attention to approximate this procedure and derive an error bound that separates the effects of pretraining tasks and prompt length, showing that once enough tasks are available the dependence on prompt length becomes dimension‑free.

By Zhongjie Shi, Rongjie Lai, Alexander Cloninger, Wenjing Liao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Induction Heads Interpolate N-Grams

arXiv:2607. 02800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Induction heads are attention circuits believed to underlie in-context learning in transformers, yet a precise characterization of the estimators they implement remains elusive.

By Francesco D'Angelo, Oguz Kaan Yuksel, Swathi Shree Narashiman, Nicolas Flammarion
arXiv AI
Jun 4

MesaNet: Sequence Modeling by Locally Optimal Test-Time Training

arXiv:2506. 05233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequence modeling is currently dominated by causal transformer architectures that use softmax self-attention.

By Johannes von Oswald, Nino Scherrer, Seijin Kobayashi, Luca Versari, Songlin Yang, Sarthak Mittal, Maximilian Schlegel, Kaitlin Maile, Yanick Schimpf, Oliver Sieberling, Alexander Meulemans, Rif A. Saurous, Guillaume Lajoie, Charlotte Frenkel, Razvan Pascanu, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Jo\~ao Sacramento
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Emergent Capabilities Arise Randomly from Learning Sparse Attention Patterns

arXiv:2606. 25010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural scaling laws for transformer language models predict smooth improvements in pretraining loss with increasing parameters, but downstream capabilities such as in-context learning are known to emerge abruptly past a certain model scale.

By Vatsal Baherwani, Zixi Chen, Shikai Qiu, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Pavel Izmailov
arXiv AI
Jun 29

The Context-Ready Transformer

arXiv:2606. 27538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the context-ready transformer, a new recurrent neural network architecture built from a D-layer transformer block that pre-contextualizes each token before it enters the block.

By Mahesh Godavarti