arXiv AI

Transformers as In-Context Samplers: From Closed-Form Diffusion to Estimation-Free Sampling

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

Transformer-based In-Context Score Operator Learning for Diffusion Models

The paper introduces a transformer-based framework that learns an in‑context score operator for diffusion models, allowing the model to perform reverse‑diffusion sampling on unseen target distributions specified by a small empirical context set. By representing the task‑dependent score as a Gaussian‑kernel conditional mean and approximating it with a transformer‑based query‑dependent attention architecture, the method can adapt to new tasks without retraining or parameter updates. The authors provide theoretical generalization‑error bounds and evaluate the approach on scientific and visual datasets, noting strong performance on simple task families and limitations as task complexity grows.

By Wuzhe Xu, Zhaiming Shen, Yulong Lu, Wenjing Liao, Rongjie Lai
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 13

Invariant Learning Dynamics of Transformers in Inductive Reasoning Tasks

We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models. While previous works on Transformer learning dynamics have so far been mostly tied to specific tasks, we study a generalized class of inductive tasks that unifies several synthetic tasks known in the literature, including in-context n-grams and multi-hop reasoning.

arXiv AI
Aug 11

LF${}^{2}$AR: Accounting for Layerwise Dynamics to Improve Multimodal Adaptation of Language Models

arXiv:2503. 06211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-pretrained language models (LMs) encode rich world knowledge, but adapting them to process and generate perceptual modalities such as audio and images while effectively leveraging that knowledge remains challenging.

By Santiago Cuervo, Adel Moumen, Yanis Labrak, Sameer Khurana, Antoine Laurent, Mickael Rouvier, Phil Woodland, Ricard Marxer
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Long-Context Demonstration Selection Using State Space Models

The paper addresses the challenge of selecting demonstrations for long-context language model queries, where transformer inference costs grow quadratically with sequence length. It proposes two algorithms that distill transformer behavior into state space models (SSMs) with linear inference time, partitioning transformer layers into groups and estimating separate SSMs for each. The distilled SSMs achieve less than 0.7% approximation error, and in downstream tasks they reduce FLOPs by 14.2× while improving accuracy by 6.48% compared to baseline methods.

By Ziniu Zhang, Zhenshuo Zhang, Ruoxuan Xiong, Gene Cooperman, Hongyang R. Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 28

Extracting Algorithms in Pre-trained LLMs: A Case on Hidden Markov Models

arXiv:2607. 22646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) display a striking ability to predict next observations from Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) via in-context learning (ICL), but the algorithm underlying this capability remains undetermined: prior work has proposed several candidates without consensus, and none has been grounded in the model's internal activations.

By Yijia Dai, Zhaolin Gao, Yahya Sattar, Jennifer J. Sun, Sarah Dean
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Language Models Struggle to Use Representations Learned In-Context

The article examines whether large language models (LLMs) can effectively use representations they learn in-context to perform downstream tasks. Experiments with open‑weight LLMs on next‑token prediction and a new adaptive world modeling task reveal that these models struggle to deploy novel semantics defined in-context, even when such semantics are encoded in their latent representations. The study also shows that state‑of‑the‑art closed‑source reasoning models similarly fail to reliably leverage in‑context patterns, highlighting a gap in flexible representation usage.

By Michael A. Lepori, Tal Linzen, Ann Yuan, Katja Filippova