activity
20222026
most citedHow Do Nonlinear Transformers Learn and Generalize in In-Context Learning?

1 citations · 4 across the 17 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

17 papers

cs.LG2026

Transformers Learn the Optimal DDPM Denoiser for Multi-Token GMMs

Hongkang Li, Hancheng Min, Rene Vidal

Transformer-based diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance at generating high-quality samples. However, our theoretical understanding of the reasons for this succe…

cs.CV2026

Visual prompting reimagined: The power of the Activation Prompts

Yihua Zhang, Hongkang Li, Yuguang Yao +5

Visual prompting (VP) has emerged as a popular method to repurpose pretrained vision models for adaptation to downstream tasks. Unlike conventional model fine-tuning techniques, VP…

cs.LG2026

A Theoretical Analysis of Mamba's Training Dynamics: Filtering Relevant Features for Generalization in State Space Models

Mugunthan Shandirasegaran, Hongkang Li, Songyang Zhang +2

The recent empirical success of Mamba and other selective state space models (SSMs) has renewed interest in non-attention architectures for sequence modeling, yet their theoretical…

cs.LG2025

How Can Mamba Learn In Context with Outliers and Generalize Provably?

Hongkang Li, Songtao Lu, Xiaodong Cui +2

The Mamba model has gained significant attention for its computational advantages over Transformer-based models, while achieving comparable performance across a wide range of langu…

cs.LG2025

Theoretical Learning Performance of Graph Neural Networks: The Impact of Jumping Connections and Layer-wise Sparsification

Jiawei Sun, Hongkang Li, Meng Wang

Jumping connections enable Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to overcome over-smoothing, while graph sparsification reduces computational demands by selecting a sub-matrix of the…

cs.LG2025

Merging Smarter, Generalizing Better: Enhancing Model Merging on OOD Data

Bingjie Zhang, Hongkang Li, Changlong Shi +5

Multi-task learning (MTL) concurrently trains a model on diverse task datasets to exploit common features, thereby improving overall performance across the tasks. Recent studies ha…

cs.LG2025

When is Task Vector Provably Effective for Model Editing? A Generalization Analysis of Nonlinear Transformers

Hongkang Li, Yihua Zhang, Shuai Zhang +3

Task arithmetic refers to editing the pre-trained model by adding a weighted sum of task vectors, each of which is the weight update from the pre-trained model to fine-tuned models…

cs.LG2024

Training Nonlinear Transformers for Chain-of-Thought Inference: A Theoretical Generalization Analysis

Hongkang Li, Songtao Lu, Pin-Yu Chen +2

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is an efficient prompting method that enables the reasoning ability of large language models by augmenting the query using multiple examples with multiple in…

cs.LG2024

Learning on Transformers is Provable Low-Rank and Sparse: A One-layer Analysis

Hongkang Li, Meng Wang, Shuai Zhang +2

Efficient training and inference algorithms, such as low-rank adaption and model pruning, have shown impressive performance for learning Transformer-based large foundation models.…

cs.LG2024★ 1 cited

What Improves the Generalization of Graph Transformers? A Theoretical Dive into the Self-attention and Positional Encoding

Hongkang Li, Meng Wang, Tengfei Ma +3

Graph Transformers, which incorporate self-attention and positional encoding, have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various graph learning tasks. Despite their impre…

stat.ML2024

How does promoting the minority fraction affect generalization? A theoretical study of the one-hidden-layer neural network on group imbalance

Hongkang Li, Shuai Zhang, Yihua Zhang +3

Group imbalance has been a known problem in empirical risk minimization (ERM), where the achieved high average accuracy is accompanied by low accuracy in a minority group. Despite…

cs.LG2024★ 1 cited

How Do Nonlinear Transformers Learn and Generalize in In-Context Learning?

Hongkang Li, Meng Wang, Songtao Lu +2

Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply aug…

cs.LG2023★ 1 cited

On the Convergence and Sample Complexity Analysis of Deep Q-Networks with -Greedy Exploration

Shuai Zhang, Hongkang Li, Meng Wang +6

This paper provides a theoretical understanding of Deep Q-Network (DQN) with the -greedy exploration in deep reinforcement learning. Despite the tremendous empirical a…

cs.AI2023

How Can Context Help? Exploring Joint Retrieval of Passage and Personalized Context

Hui Wan, Hongkang Li, Songtao Lu +2

The integration of external personalized context information into document-grounded conversational systems has significant potential business value, but has not been well-studied.…

cs.LG2023★ 1 cited

A Theoretical Understanding of Shallow Vision Transformers: Learning, Generalization, and Sample Complexity

Hongkang Li, Meng Wang, Sijia Liu +1

Vision Transformers (ViTs) with self-attention modules have recently achieved great empirical success in many vision tasks. Due to non-convex interactions across layers, however, t…

cs.LG2022

Learning and generalization of one-hidden-layer neural networks, going beyond standard Gaussian data

Hongkang Li, Shuai Zhang, Meng Wang

This paper analyzes the convergence and generalization of training a one-hidden-layer neural network when the input features follow the Gaussian mixture model consisting of a finit…

cs.LG2022

Generalization Guarantee of Training Graph Convolutional Networks with Graph Topology Sampling

Hongkang Li, Meng Wang, Sijia Liu +2

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently achieved great empirical success in learning graph-structured data. To address its scalability issue due to the recursive embeddin…