Do Pretrained Transformers Learn In-Context by Gradient Descent?

Explore a 15-minute conference talk presented by Aayush Mishra at ICML 2024, examining the relationship between In-Context Learning (ICL) and Gradient Descent (GD) in pre-trained language models. Delve into the limitations of previous theoretical connections between ICL and GD, highlighting the differences between experimental setups and real-world language model training. Analyze the speaker's findings on the divergent sensitivities of ICL and GD to demonstration order, and examine comprehensive empirical analyses conducted on the LLaMa-7B model. Gain insights into how ICL and GD differently modify output distributions in language models, and understand why the equivalence between these two concepts remains an open hypothesis requiring further investigation.