Understanding In-Context Learning Beyond Transformers: An Investigation of State Space and Hybrid Architectures

We perform in-depth evaluations of in-context learning (ICL) on state-of-the-art transformer, state-space, and hybrid large language models over two categories of knowledge-based ICL tasks. Using a combination of behavioral probing and intervention-based methods, we have discovered that, while LLMs of different architectures can behave similarly in task performance, their internals could remain different. We discover that function vectors (FVs) responsible for ICL are primarily located in the self-attention and Mamba layers, and speculate that Mamba2 uses a different mechanism from FVs to perform ICL. FVs are more important for ICL involving parametric knowledge retrieval, but not for contextual knowledge understanding. Our work contributes to a more nuanced understanding across architectures and task types. Methodologically, our approach also highlights the importance of combining both behavioural and mechanistic analyses to investigate LLM capabilities.

Developing multilingual speech synthesis system for Ojibwe, Mi'kmaq, and Maliseet

We present lightweight flow matching multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) systems for Ojibwe, Mi'kmaq, and Maliseet, three Indigenous languages in North America. Our results show that training a multilingual TTS model on three typologically similar languages can improve the performance over monolingual models, especially when data are scarce. Attention-free architectures are highly competitive with self-attention architecture with higher memory efficiency. Our research not only advances technical development for the revitalization of low-resource languages but also highlights the cultural gap in human evaluation protocols, calling for a more community-centered approach to human evaluation.