{"paper":{"title":"Learning to grok: Emergence of in-context learning and skill composition in modular arithmetic tasks","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cond-mat.dis-nn","hep-th","stat.ML"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Andrey Gromov, Aritra Das, Darshil Doshi, Tianyu He","submitted_at":"2024-06-04T17:59:36Z","abstract_excerpt":"Large language models can solve tasks that were not present in the training set. This capability is believed to be due to in-context learning and skill composition. In this work, we study the emergence of in-context learning and skill composition in a collection of modular arithmetic tasks. Specifically, we consider a finite collection of linear modular functions $z = a \\, x + b \\, y \\;\\mathrm{mod}\\; p$ labeled by the vector $(a, b) \\in \\mathbb{Z}_p^2$. We use some of these tasks for pre-training and the rest for out-of-distribution testing. We empirically show that a GPT-style transformer exh"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2406.02550","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2406.02550/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}