arXiv Machine Learning

Decomposing Prediction Mechanisms for In-Context Recall

arXiv:2507. 01414v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new family of toy problems that combine features of linear-regression-style continuous in-context learning (ICL) with discrete associative recall.

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 Machine Learning
Aug 31

Fast Weight Attention for Continual Learning

Fast Weight Attention for Continual Learning introduces recurrent fast‑weight memories and selective state‑space models that compress expanding context into a fixed‑size recurrent state, enabling an online learning rule for state transitions. The paper derives normalized first‑order updates for squared‑error regression and negative inner‑product objectives, presenting several variants (Falcon‑1, Falcon‑2, Falcon‑3 and their inner‑product counterparts) with recurrent, masked‑parallel, and chunk‑parallel implementations. These methods demonstrate competitive performance in language modeling and improved length extrapolation on variable‑digit addition tasks.

By Yifan Zhang, Steve Ta, Jasper Zhang, Jichen Feng, Shuzhen Li, Yongxin Zhang, Yifeng Liu, Huizhuo Yuan, Mengdi Wang, Quanquan Gu, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao