Matt Olson
ResearchBlog

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What Kind of a Statistician is a Transformer?

August 19, 2026

A statistical view of in-context learning through Jacobians, smoothers, and effective degrees of freedom.

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Transformer Induction Heads

July 30, 2026

Training small transformers to copy from context, and watching induction heads form as a two-layer circuit.

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Much of linear least-squares learning is spectral filtering

July 23, 2026

OLS, ridge, PCR, gradient descent, momentum, and early stopping are all one estimator with a different filter function on the data spectrum.

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Epoch-wise double descent in OLS

July 21, 2026

Double descent in plain OLS, traced over training epochs rather than model size, where the implicit bias of gradient descent does the work.

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Matt Olson

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