In-Context Learning of Energy Functions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach called in-context learning of energy functions, enabling more flexible modeling of in-context distributions beyond traditional methods, with preliminary evidence on synthetic data.

Contribution

It proposes a general framework for in-context learning using energy functions, extending the capability to cases where input and output spaces differ.

Findings

Preliminary empirical success on synthetic data.

First demonstration of in-context learning with differing input and output spaces.

Abstract

In-context learning is a powerful capability of certain machine learning models that arguably underpins the success of today's frontier AI models. However, in-context learning is critically limited to settings where the in-context distribution of interest $p_{\theta}^{ICL}( x|\mathcal{D})$ can be straightforwardly expressed and/or parameterized by the model; for instance, language modeling relies on expressing the next-token distribution as a categorical distribution parameterized by the network's output logits. In this work, we present a more general form of in-context learning without such a limitation that we call \textit{in-context learning of energy functions}. The idea is to instead learn the unconstrained and arbitrary in-context energy function $E_{\theta}^{ICL}(x|\mathcal{D})$ corresponding to the in-context distribution $p_{\theta}^{ICL}(x|\mathcal{D})$. To do this, we use classic ideas from energy-based modeling. We provide preliminary evidence that our method empirically works on synthetic data. Interestingly, our work contributes (to the best of our knowledge) the first example of in-context learning where the input space and output space differ from one another, suggesting that in-context learning is a more-general capability than previously realized.