arXiv:2609.36448v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to perform new tasks without additional fine-tuning. Ho...
By Junze Deng, Daouda Sow, Sen Lin, Yingbin Liang
arXiv:2607. 00479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based large models have demonstrated remarkable generalization abilities across different tasks by leveraging a context-aware attention module for in-context learning.
By Peilin Liu, Ding-Xuan Zhou
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.
By Mary Letey, Yue M. Lu, Cengiz Pehlevan, Jacob Zavatone-Veth
arXiv:2606. 06814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The transformer's emergent ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) has sparked a wide range of studies designed to understand its underlying mechanisms.
By Soo Min Kwon, Alec S. Xu, Can Yaras, Dogyoon Song, Laura Balzano, Qing Qu
arXiv:2606. 05134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep active learning has previously been explored for LLM in-context sample selection, but not with methods that utilise recent advances in understanding of transformer activations.
By Yaseen M. Osman, Geoff V. Merrett, Stuart E. Middleton
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
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:2608. 07921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We apply Marchenko-Pastur (MP) random matrix theory to pre-trained attention weights in order to separate each projection matrix into a random-like bulk and a set of spectral outliers.
By Kasun Dewage, Marianna Pensky, Suranadi De Silva, T. H. Bandara
arXiv:2505. 15548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive transformer language models frequently exhibit training instability when trained on long sequences, particularly under low-precision arithmetic.
By Suvadeep Hajra
arXiv:2609.13141v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Post-training attention sparsification reduces the quadratic cumulative attention cost of pretrained Transformers by selecting a small set of context u...
By Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhu, Hao Gu, Xiang Hu, Yan Wang, Haitao Mi, Sirui Han, Leo Liang, Zhijiang Guo
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: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