activity
20242026
collaborators

12 papers

stat.ML2026

Sequential Correlations Change In-Context Learning: Effective Context Length and Architectural Mismatch

Mary Letey, Yue M. Lu, Cengiz Pehlevan +1

Modern sequence models have a striking capacity for in-context learning (ICL); they can perform new tasks based only on examples given in the prompt. Understanding how this ability…

q-bio.NC2026

Stationary covariance spectra of discrete-time non-normal random recurrent dynamics

Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth

Principal component analysis is widely used to characterize structure in the dynamics of recurrent neural networks. For stationary noise-driven dynamics, the distribution of varian…

q-bio.NC2026

Stimulus symmetries can confound representational similarity analyses

Farhad Pashakhanloo, Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth

What can representational similarity matrices (RSMs) tell us about a neural code? As the popularity of these summary statistics grows, so too does the need for a more complete char…

cs.LG2026

A Random Matrix Theory Perspective on the Consistency of Diffusion Models

Binxu Wang, Jacob Zavatone-Veth, Cengiz Pehlevan

Diffusion models trained on different, non-overlapping subsets of a dataset often produce strikingly similar outputs when given the same noise seed. We trace this consistency to a…

stat.ML2025

Pretrain-Test Task Alignment Governs Generalization in In-Context Learning

Mary I. Letey, Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth, Yue M. Lu +1

In-context learning (ICL) is a central capability of Transformer models, but the structures in data that enable its emergence and govern its robustness remain poorly understood. In…

cond-mat.dis-nn2025

A note on the dynamics of extended-context disordered kinetic spin models

Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth, Cengiz Pehlevan

Inspired by striking advances in language modeling, there has recently been much interest in developing autogressive sequence models that are amenable to analytical study. In this…