arXiv:2506.15329cs.LGcs.AI2025-06NeurIPS被引 5

揭示无标签数据如何在上下文学习中提升性能,理论证明深度模型可有效利用缺失标签的演示。

When and How Unlabeled Data Provably Improve In-Context Learning

  • 用多层或循环Transformer隐式构建多项式估计器,利用部分标签数据。
  • 深度每增加1,可表达的多项式阶数指数增长,少量深度即有效。
  • 适用于提升表格型基础模型的半监督学习能力,实测显著优于传统方法。

最近研究发现,即使示范样本存在标签缺失或错误,上下文学习(ICL)仍可有效。为揭示此现象,本文在二元高斯混合模型设定下,分析了部分标签缺失的示范数据。理论表明:一维线性注意力模型虽能恢复全监督最优估计,却无法利用无标签数据;而多层或循环Transformer可通过隐式构造形如∑_{i≥0} a_i (X^⊤X)^iX^⊤y的估计器,有效利用无标签数据,其中X和y分别为特征与部分观测标签(缺失值置零)。我们刻画了深度决定的可表达多项式类,并与期望最大化(EM)算法——半监督学习中常用的迭代伪标签法——建立联系。关键的是,主导项的幂次随深度呈指数增长,因此适度深度或循环即可生效。基于此理论,我们提出对现成表格型基础模型引入循环推理以增强半监督能力。在真实数据集上的大量实验表明,该方法显著优于标准单次前向推理的半监督表格式学习性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recent research shows that in-context learning (ICL) can be effective even when demonstrations have missing or incorrect labels. To shed light on this capability, we examine a canonical setting where the demonstrations are drawn according to a binary Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and a certain fraction of the demonstrations have missing labels. We provide a comprehensive theoretical study to show that: (1) The loss landscape of one-layer linear attention models recover the optimal fully-supervised estimator but completely fail to exploit unlabeled data; (2) In contrast, multilayer or looped transformers can effectively leverage unlabeled data by implicitly constructing estimators of the form $\sum_{i\ge 0} a_i (X^\top X)^iX^\top y$ with $X$ and $y$ denoting features and partially-observed labels (with missing entries set to zero). We characterize the class of polynomials that can be expressed as a function of depth and draw connections to Expectation Maximization, an iterative pseudo-labeling algorithm commonly used in semi-supervised learning. Importantly, the leading polynomial power is exponential in depth, so mild amount of depth/looping suffices. As an application of theory, we propose looping off-the-shelf tabular foundation models to enhance their semi-supervision capabilities. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets show that our method significantly improves the semisupervised tabular learning performance over the standard single pass inference.

上下文学习半监督学习Transformer理论分析

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