Theory on Attention Dynamics for Out-of-Distribution In-Context Learning

Junze Deng, Daouda Sow, Sen Lin, Yingbin Liang

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to perform new tasks without additional fine-tuning. However, their performance often deteriorates when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs that deviate from the training distribution, and the underlying theory remains poorly understood. To fill this gap, we characterize the OOD error under the input distribution shift through the interplay between the dynamics of the so-called $α$-type and $β$-type attention weights, which represent the transformer's confidence in identifying the correct and incorrect features, respectively. Our results indicate that the OOD error for each feature depends on all pairwise interactions between the training features and OOD features, and under certain cases the transformer performs no better than random guessing. To improve the OOD generalization performance, we next investigate the impact of model finetuning with the OOD data, and particularly, characterize the model forgetting performance on the source domain. Interestingly, the performance on the source domain may not always degrade after finetuning, which highly depends on the nature of the…