arXiv Machine Learning

How Can Mamba Learn In Context with Outliers and Generalize Provably?

arXiv:2510. 00399v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Mamba model has gained significant attention for its computational advantages over Transformer-based models, while achieving comparable performance across a wide range of language tasks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Conditioned Initialization for Attention

arXiv:2609.07086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers are a dominant architecture in modern machine learning, powering applications across vision, language, and beyond. At the core of their su...

By Hemanth Saratchandran, Simon Lucey
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 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
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