Abstract:Transformers have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multi-step reasoning tasks. However, understandings of the underlying mechanisms by which they acquire these abilities through training remain limited, particularly from a theoretical standpoint. This work investigates how transformers learn to solve symbolic multi-step reasoning problems through chain-of-thought processes, focusing on path-finding in trees. We analyze two intertwined tasks: a backward reasoning task, where the model outputs a path from a goal node to the root, and a more complex forward reasoning task, where the model implements two-stage reasoning by first identifying the goal-to-root path and then reversing it to produce the root-to-goal path. Our theoretical analysis, grounded in the dynamics of gradient descent, shows that trained one-layer transformers can provably solve both tasks with generalization guarantees to unseen trees. In particular, our multi-phase training dynamics for forward reasoning elucidate how different attention heads learn to specialize and coordinate autonomously to solve the two subtasks in a single autoregressive path. These results provide a mechanistic explanation of how trained transformers can implement sequential algorithmic procedures. Moreover, they offer insights into the emergence of reasoning abilities, suggesting that when tasks are structured to take intermediate chain-of-thought steps, even shallow multi-head transformers can effectively solve problems that would otherwise require deeper architectures.
Abstract:The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously unseen tasks using task-specific prompts without updating parameters, a phenomenon known as in-context learning (ICL). Recent research has actively explored the training dynamics behind ICL, with much of the focus on relatively simple tasks such as linear regression and binary classification. To advance the theoretical understanding of ICL, this paper investigates more complex nonlinear regression tasks, aiming to uncover how transformers acquire in-context learning capabilities in these settings. We analyze the stage-wise dynamics of attention during training: attention scores between a query token and its target features grow rapidly in the early phase, then gradually converge to one, while attention to irrelevant features decays more slowly and exhibits oscillatory behavior. Our analysis introduces new proof techniques that explicitly characterize how the nature of general non-degenerate L-Lipschitz task functions affects attention weights. Specifically, we identify that the Lipschitz constant L of nonlinear function classes as a key factor governing the convergence dynamics of transformers in ICL. Leveraging these insights, for two distinct regimes depending on whether L is below or above a threshold, we derive different time bounds to guarantee near-zero prediction error. Notably, despite the convergence time depending on the underlying task functions, we prove that query tokens consistently attend to prompt tokens with highly relevant features at convergence, demonstrating the ICL capability of transformers for unseen functions.
Abstract:Language recognition tasks are fundamental in natural language processing (NLP) and have been widely used to benchmark the performance of large language models (LLMs). These tasks also play a crucial role in explaining the working mechanisms of transformers. In this work, we focus on two representative tasks in the category of regular language recognition, known as `even pairs' and `parity check', the aim of which is to determine whether the occurrences of certain subsequences in a given sequence are even. Our goal is to explore how a one-layer transformer, consisting of an attention layer followed by a linear layer, learns to solve these tasks by theoretically analyzing its training dynamics under gradient descent. While even pairs can be solved directly by a one-layer transformer, parity check need to be solved by integrating Chain-of-Thought (CoT), either into the inference stage of a transformer well-trained for the even pairs task, or into the training of a one-layer transformer. For both problems, our analysis shows that the joint training of attention and linear layers exhibits two distinct phases. In the first phase, the attention layer grows rapidly, mapping data sequences into separable vectors. In the second phase, the attention layer becomes stable, while the linear layer grows logarithmically and approaches in direction to a max-margin hyperplane that correctly separates the attention layer outputs into positive and negative samples, and the loss decreases at a rate of $O(1/t)$. Our experiments validate those theoretical results.
Abstract:Complex data mining has wide application value in many fields, especially in the feature extraction and classification tasks of unlabeled data. This paper proposes an algorithm based on self-supervised learning and verifies its effectiveness through experiments. The study found that in terms of the selection of optimizer and learning rate, the combination of AdamW optimizer and 0.002 learning rate performed best in all evaluation indicators, indicating that the adaptive optimization method can improve the performance of the model in complex data mining tasks. In addition, the ablation experiment further analyzed the contribution of each module. The results show that contrastive learning, variational modules, and data augmentation strategies play a key role in the generalization ability and robustness of the model. Through the convergence curve analysis of the loss function, the experiment verifies that the method can converge stably during the training process and effectively avoid serious overfitting. Further experimental results show that the model has strong adaptability on different data sets, can effectively extract high-quality features from unlabeled data, and improves classification accuracy. At the same time, under different data distribution conditions, the method can still maintain high detection accuracy, proving its applicability in complex data environments. This study analyzed the role of self-supervised learning methods in complex data mining through systematic experiments and verified its advantages in improving feature extraction quality, optimizing classification performance, and enhancing model stability
Abstract:Pretraining large language models (LLMs) on vast and heterogeneous datasets is crucial for achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse downstream tasks. However, current training paradigms treat all samples equally, overlooking the importance or relevance of individual samples throughout the training process. Existing reweighting strategies, which primarily focus on group-level data importance, fail to leverage fine-grained instance-level information and do not adapt dynamically to individual sample importance as training progresses. In this paper, we introduce novel algorithms for dynamic, instance-level data reweighting aimed at improving both the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM pretraining. Our methods adjust the weight of each training sample based on its loss value in an online fashion, allowing the model to dynamically focus on more informative or important samples at the current training stage. In particular, our framework allows us to systematically devise reweighting strategies deprioritizing redundant or uninformative data, which we find tend to work best. Furthermore, we develop a new theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of loss-based reweighting on the convergence of gradient-based optimization, providing the first formal characterization of how these strategies affect convergence bounds. We empirically validate our approach across a spectrum of tasks, from pretraining 7B and 1.4B parameter LLMs to smaller-scale language models and linear regression problems, demonstrating that our loss-based reweighting approach can lead to faster convergence and significantly improved performance.
Abstract:Deep learning has emerged as a transformative approach for solving complex pattern recognition and object detection challenges. This paper focuses on the application of a novel detection framework based on the RT-DETR model for analyzing intricate image data, particularly in areas such as diabetic retinopathy detection. Diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause of vision loss globally, requires accurate and efficient image analysis to identify early-stage lesions. The proposed RT-DETR model, built on a Transformer-based architecture, excels at processing high-dimensional and complex visual data with enhanced robustness and accuracy. Comparative evaluations with models such as YOLOv5, YOLOv8, SSD, and DETR demonstrate that RT-DETR achieves superior performance across precision, recall, mAP50, and mAP50-95 metrics, particularly in detecting small-scale objects and densely packed targets. This study underscores the potential of Transformer-based models like RT-DETR for advancing object detection tasks, offering promising applications in medical imaging and beyond.
Abstract:This document presents an in-depth examination of stock market sentiment through the integration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), enabling precise risk alerts. The robust feature extraction capability of CNN is utilized to preprocess and analyze extensive network text data, identifying local features and patterns. The extracted feature sequences are then input into the GRU model to understand the progression of emotional states over time and their potential impact on future market sentiment and risk. This approach addresses the order dependence and long-term dependencies inherent in time series data, resulting in a detailed analysis of stock market sentiment and effective early warnings of future risks.
Abstract:In the 21st-century information age, with the development of big data technology, effectively extracting valuable information from massive data has become a key issue. Traditional data mining methods are inadequate when faced with large-scale, high-dimensional and complex data. Especially when labeled data is scarce, their performance is greatly limited. This study optimizes data mining algorithms by introducing semi-supervised learning methods, aiming to improve the algorithm's ability to utilize unlabeled data, thereby achieving more accurate data analysis and pattern recognition under limited labeled data conditions. Specifically, we adopt a self-training method and combine it with a convolutional neural network (CNN) for image feature extraction and classification, and continuously improve the model prediction performance through an iterative process. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms traditional machine learning techniques such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), XGBoost, and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) on the CIFAR-10 image classification dataset. Notable improvements were observed in key performance metrics, including accuracy, recall, and F1 score. Furthermore, the robustness and noise-resistance capabilities of the semi-supervised CNN model were validated through experiments under varying noise levels, confirming its practical applicability in real-world scenarios.
Abstract:This paper presents an innovative approach to enhancing few-shot learning by integrating data augmentation with model fine-tuning in a framework designed to tackle the challenges posed by small-sample data. Recognizing the critical limitations of traditional machine learning models that require large datasets-especially in fields such as drug discovery, target recognition, and malicious traffic detection-this study proposes a novel strategy that leverages Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and advanced optimization techniques to improve model performance with limited data. Specifically, the paper addresses the noise and bias issues introduced by data augmentation methods, contrasting them with model-based approaches, such as fine-tuning and metric learning, which rely heavily on related datasets. By combining Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and discriminative model ensemble strategies within a GAN framework, the proposed model adjusts generative and discriminative distributions to simulate a broader range of relevant data. Furthermore, it employs MHLoss and a reparameterized GAN ensemble to enhance stability and accelerate convergence, ultimately leading to improved classification performance on small-sample images and structured datasets. Results confirm that the MhERGAN algorithm developed in this research is highly effective for few-shot learning, offering a practical solution that bridges data scarcity with high-performing model adaptability and generalization.
Abstract:Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in robust RL focus on Markov decision processes (MDPs), robust non-Markovian RL is limited to planning problem where the transitions in the uncertainty set are known. In this paper, we study the learning problem of robust offline non-Markovian RL. Specifically, when the nominal model admits a low-rank structure, we propose a new algorithm, featuring a novel dataset distillation and a lower confidence bound (LCB) design for robust values under different types of the uncertainty set. We also derive new dual forms for these robust values in non-Markovian RL, making our algorithm more amenable to practical implementation. By further introducing a novel type-I concentrability coefficient tailored for offline low-rank non-Markovian decision processes, we prove that our algorithm can find an $\epsilon$-optimal robust policy using $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ offline samples. Moreover, we extend our algorithm to the case when the nominal model does not have specific structure. With a new type-II concentrability coefficient, the extended algorithm also enjoys polynomial sample efficiency under all different types of the uncertainty set.