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The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remains poorly understood despite its consistent effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples. To clarify and improve these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Waïss Azizian , Ali Hasan

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have expanded beyond natural language processing to scientific prediction tasks, including molecular property prediction. However, their effectiveness in in-context learning remains…

Transformer-based large language models exhibit in-context learning, enabling adaptation to downstream tasks via few-shot prompting with demonstrations. In practice, such models are often fine-tuned to improve zero-shot performance on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Chungpa Lee , Jy-yong Sohn , Kangwook Lee

Language models significantly benefit from context tokens, such as prompts or scratchpads. They perform better when prompted with informative instructions, and they acquire new reasoning capabilities by generating a scratch-pad before…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Charlie Snell , Dan Klein , Ruiqi Zhong

Large language models (LLMs) tend to inadequately integrate input context during text generation, relying excessively on encoded prior knowledge in model parameters, potentially resulting in generated text with factual inconsistencies or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Zheng Zhao , Emilio Monti , Jens Lehmann , Haytham Assem

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful models that can learn concepts at the inference stage via in-context learning (ICL). While theoretical studies, e.g., \cite{zhang2023trained}, attempt to explain the mechanism of ICL, they assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yue Xing , Xiaofeng Lin , Chenheng Xu , Namjoon Suh , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) operate in two fundamental learning modes - fine-tuning (FT) and in-context learning (ICL) - raising key questions about which mode yields greater language proficiency and whether they differ in their inductive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bishwamittra Ghosh , Soumi Das , Till Speicher , Qinyuan Wu , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Deepak Garg , Krishna P. Gummadi , Evimaria Terzi

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to perform new tasks by conditioning on a sequence of examples. Most prior work reasonably and intuitively assumes that which examples are chosen has a far greater effect on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Warren Li , Yiqian Wang , Zihan Wang , Jingbo Shang

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), which enables the model to perform new tasks conditioning only on the examples provided in the context without updating the model's weights. While ICL offers fast adaptation…

Transformer-based large language models face severe scalability challenges in long-context generation due to the computational and memory costs of full-context attention. Under practical computation and memory constraints, many…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xianpeng Shang , Jiang Li , Zehua Duo , Qianyi Cai , Xiangdong Su

Language Models (LMs) can perform new tasks by adapting to a few in-context examples. For humans, explanations that connect examples to task principles can improve learning. We therefore investigate whether explanations of few-shot examples…

We propose a novel class of language models, Latent Thought Models (LTMs), which incorporate explicit latent thought vectors that follow an explicit prior model in latent space. These latent thought vectors guide the autoregressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Deqian Kong , Minglu Zhao , Dehong Xu , Bo Pang , Shu Wang , Edouardo Honig , Zhangzhang Si , Chuan Li , Jianwen Xie , Sirui Xie , Ying Nian Wu

Large pre-training language models (PLMs) have shown promising in-context learning abilities. However, due to the backbone transformer architecture, existing PLMs are bottlenecked by the memory and computational cost when scaling up to a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Mukai Li , Shansan Gong , Jiangtao Feng , Yiheng Xu , Jun Zhang , Zhiyong Wu , Lingpeng Kong

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks by prompting them with a sequence of training examples. However, it is known that ICL is very sensitive to the choice of training examples: randomly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Ting-Yun Chang , Robin Jia

Large Language models (LLMs) possess the capability to engage In-context Learning (ICL) by leveraging a few demonstrations pertaining to a new downstream task as conditions. However, this particular learning paradigm suffers from high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Hongfu Liu , Ye Wang

Large-scale generative models show an impressive ability to perform a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using in-context learning, where a few examples are used to describe a task to the model. For Machine Translation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Sweta Agrawal , Chunting Zhou , Mike Lewis , Luke Zettlemoyer , Marjan Ghazvininejad

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables pretrained LLMs to adapt to downstream tasks by conditioning on a small set of input-output demonstrations, without any parameter updates. Although there have been many theoretical efforts to explain how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Xuhan Tong , Yuchen Zeng , Jiawei Zhang

Modern large language models (LLMs) are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Unlike traditional learners, LLMs cannot use back-propagation to obtain feedback, and condition…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Adrian de Wynter , Xun Wang , Qilong Gu , Si-Qing Chen

Language models exhibit an emergent ability to learn a new task from a small number of input-output demonstrations. However, recent work shows that in-context learners largely rely on their pre-trained knowledge, such as the sentiment of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Michal Štefánik , Marek Kadlčík

Instruction tuning is a widely used approach to improve the instruction-following ability of large language models (LLMs). Instruction-tuning datasets typically include a mixture of context-augmented and context-free examples, yet prior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Hyunji Lee , Seunghyun Yoon , Yunjae Won , Hanseok Oh , Geewook Kim , Trung Bui , Franck Dernoncourt , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal , Minjoon Seo