Is Mamba Capable of In-Context Learning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Grazzi, Riccardo, Siems, Julien, Schrodi, Simon, Brox, Thomas, Hutter, Frank
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Grazzi, Riccardo
Siems, Julien
Schrodi, Simon
Brox, Thomas
Hutter, Frank
author_facet Grazzi, Riccardo
Siems, Julien
Schrodi, Simon
Brox, Thomas
Hutter, Frank
contents State of the art foundation models such as GPT-4 perform surprisingly well at in-context learning (ICL), a variant of meta-learning concerning the learned ability to solve tasks during a neural network forward pass, exploiting contextual information provided as input to the model. This useful ability emerges as a side product of the foundation model's massive pretraining. While transformer models are currently the state of the art in ICL, this work provides empirical evidence that Mamba, a newly proposed state space model which scales better than transformers w.r.t. the input sequence length, has similar ICL capabilities. We evaluated Mamba on tasks involving simple function approximation as well as more complex natural language processing problems. Our results demonstrate that, across both categories of tasks, Mamba closely matches the performance of transformer models for ICL. Further analysis reveals that, like transformers, Mamba appears to solve ICL problems by incrementally optimizing its internal representations. Overall, our work suggests that Mamba can be an efficient alternative to transformers for ICL tasks involving long input sequences. This is an exciting finding in meta-learning and may enable generalizations of in-context learned AutoML algorithms (like TabPFN or Optformer) to long input sequences.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03170
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is Mamba Capable of In-Context Learning?
Grazzi, Riccardo
Siems, Julien
Schrodi, Simon
Brox, Thomas
Hutter, Frank
Machine Learning
State of the art foundation models such as GPT-4 perform surprisingly well at in-context learning (ICL), a variant of meta-learning concerning the learned ability to solve tasks during a neural network forward pass, exploiting contextual information provided as input to the model. This useful ability emerges as a side product of the foundation model's massive pretraining. While transformer models are currently the state of the art in ICL, this work provides empirical evidence that Mamba, a newly proposed state space model which scales better than transformers w.r.t. the input sequence length, has similar ICL capabilities. We evaluated Mamba on tasks involving simple function approximation as well as more complex natural language processing problems. Our results demonstrate that, across both categories of tasks, Mamba closely matches the performance of transformer models for ICL. Further analysis reveals that, like transformers, Mamba appears to solve ICL problems by incrementally optimizing its internal representations. Overall, our work suggests that Mamba can be an efficient alternative to transformers for ICL tasks involving long input sequences. This is an exciting finding in meta-learning and may enable generalizations of in-context learned AutoML algorithms (like TabPFN or Optformer) to long input sequences.
title Is Mamba Capable of In-Context Learning?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03170