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Transformers Efficiently Perform In-Context Logistic Regression via Normalized Gradient Descent
One widely recognized interpretation for their empirical success is their ability to perform in-context learning (ICL): pretrained transformers are capable of performing previously unseen tasks based on demonstrations and examples in the prompt, without requiring any additional task-specific fine-tuning (Brown et al., 2020). A line of recent works interpret the in-context learning (ICL) capability of transformers from an algorithmic perspective, viewing transformers as models that can implicitly execute certain learning algorithms on the context examples. Specifically, Garg et al. (2022) proposes a theoretical framework for ICL in terms of learning a hypothesis class, and empirically shows that transformers can in-context learn the linear function class. Motivated by this empirical finding, several recent works attempt to theoretically study how transformers perform in-context learning on linear regression tasks. Aky urek et al. (2022); Von Oswald et al. (2023) construct multi-layer transformers with linear attention that can execute gradient descent on the an "in-context loss" defined on the context data, thereby enabling in-context learning of linear regression.
FL-Sailer: Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning for Scalable Single-Cell Epigenetic Data Analysis via Adaptive Sampling
Zhang, Guangyi, Dai, Yi, He, Yiyun, Liu, Junhao
Single-cell ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq) enables high-resolution mapping of chromatin accessibility, yet privacy regulations and data size constraints hinder multi-institutional sharing. Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving alternative, but faces three fundamental barriers in scATAC-seq analysis: ultra-high dimensionality, extreme sparsity, and severe cross-institutional heterogeneity. We propose FL-Sailer, the first FL framework designed for scATAC-seq data. FL-Sailer integrates two key innovations: (i) adaptive leverage score sampling, which selects biologically interpretable features while reducing dimensionality by 80%, and (ii) an invariant VAE architecture, which disentangles biological signals from technical confounders via mutual information minimization. We provide a convergence guarantee, showing that FL-Sailer converges to an approximate solution of the original high-dimensional problem with bounded error. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real epigenomic datasets demonstrate that FL-Sailer not only enables previously infeasible multi-institutional collaborations but also surpasses centralized methods by leveraging adaptive sampling as an implicit regularizer to suppress technical noise. Our work establishes that federated learning, when tailored to domain-specific challenges, can become a superior paradigm for collaborative epigenomic research.
On the Expressive Power of Contextual Relations in Transformers
Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable empirical success in modeling contextual relationships in natural language, yet a precise mathematical characterization of their expressive power remains incomplete. In this work, we introduce a measure-theoretic framework for contextual representations in which texts are modeled as probability measures over a semantic embedding space, and contextual relations between words, are represented as coupling measures between them. Within this setting, we introduce Sinkhorn Transformer, a transformer-like architecture. Our main result is a universal approximation theorem: any continuous coupling function between probability measures, that encodes the semantic relation coupling measure, can be uniformly approximated by a Sinkhorn Transformer with appropriate parameters.
Conditional Distributional Treatment Effects: Doubly Robust Estimation and Testing
Beyond conditional average treatment effects, treatments may impact the entire outcome distribution in covariate-dependent ways, for example, by altering the variance or tail risks for specific subpopulations. We propose a novel estimand to capture such conditional distributional treatment effects, and develop a doubly robust estimator that is minimax optimal in the local asymptotic sense. Using this, we develop a test for the global homogeneity of conditional potential outcome distributions that accommodates discrepancies beyond the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), has provably valid type 1 error, and is consistent against fixed alternatives -- the first test, to our knowledge, with such guarantees in this setting. Furthermore, we derive exact closed-form expressions for two natural discrepancies (including the MMD), and provide a computationally efficient, permutation-free algorithm for our test.
Large-batchOptimizationforDenseVisualPredictions
At thet-th backward propagation step, we can derive the gradient il(wt)toupdatei-th module inM. The number in the bracket represents the batch size. We see that when the batch size is small (i.e.,32), the gradientvariancesaresimilar. N and K indicate the number of FPN levels and region proposals fed into the detection head. To evaluate this assumption, as shown in Figure 1, we have three observations. As illustrated by the second figure in Figure 1, the gradient misalignment phenomenon between detection head and backbone has been reduced.
OntheSaturationEffectsofSpectralAlgorithms inLargeDimensions
Manynon-parametric regression methods areproposed to solve the regression problem by assuming thatf falls into certain function classes, including polynomial splines Stone (1994), local polynomials Cleveland (1979); Stone (1977), the spectral algorithmsCaponnetto(2006);CaponnettoandDeVito(2007);CaponnettoandYao(2010),etc.