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Large language models, comprising billions of parameters and pre-trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have been claimed to acquire certain capabilities without having been specifically trained on them. These capabilities, referred to as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Sheng Lu , Irina Bigoulaeva , Rachneet Sachdeva , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

Large language models can solve tasks that were not present in the training set. This capability is believed to be due to in-context learning and skill composition. In this work, we study the emergence of in-context learning and skill…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tianyu He , Darshil Doshi , Aritra Das , Andrey Gromov

At present, the mechanisms of in-context learning in Transformers are not well understood and remain mostly an intuition. In this paper, we suggest that training Transformers on auto-regressive objectives is closely related to…

Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Tong Yang , Yu Huang , Yingbin Liang , Yuejie Chi

Transformer models can use two fundamentally different kinds of information: information stored in weights during training, and information provided ``in-context'' at inference time. In this work, we show that transformers exhibit different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Ishita Dasgupta , Junkyung Kim , Dharshan Kumaran , Andrew K. Lampinen , Felix Hill

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 augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Songtao Lu , Xiaodong Cui , Pin-Yu Chen

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…

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

Neural sequence models, especially transformers, exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning. They can construct new predictors from sequences of labeled examples $(x, f(x))$ presented in the input without further parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Ekin Akyürek , Dale Schuurmans , Jacob Andreas , Tengyu Ma , Denny Zhou

Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-23 Ruiqi Zhang , Spencer Frei , Peter L. Bartlett

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Madhur Panwar , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. Despite extensive empirical studies, a principled understanding of ICL emergence at scale remains more elusive. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sushant Mehta , Ishan Gupta

A significant obstacle in the development of robust machine learning models is covariate shift, a form of distribution shift that occurs when the input distributions of the training and test sets differ while the conditional label…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-17 Nilesh Tripuraneni , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

Non-stationary sequences arise naturally in control, forecasting, and decision-making. The data-generating process shifts at unknown times, and models must detect the change, discard or downweight obsolete evidence, and adapt to new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Carson Dudley , Yutong Bi , Xiaofeng Liu , Samet Oymak

Large language models are capable of in-context learning, the ability to perform new tasks at test time using a handful of input-output examples, without parameter updates. We develop a universal approximation theory to elucidate how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Gen Li , Yuchen Jiao , Yu Huang , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen

In this work, we investigate an intriguing and prevalent phenomenon of diffusion models which we term as "consistent model reproducibility": given the same starting noise input and a deterministic sampler, different diffusion models often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Huijie Zhang , Jinfan Zhou , Yifu Lu , Minzhe Guo , Peng Wang , Liyue Shen , Qing Qu

Real-world datasets are inherently heterogeneous, yet how per-class structural differences and sampling imbalance shape the training dynamics of diffusion models-and potentially exacerbate disparities-remains poorly understood. While models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Flavio Nicoletti , Chenxiao Ma , Enrico Ventura , Luca Saglietti , Stefano Sarao Mannelli

Large language models manifest the ability of few-shot adaptation to a sequence of provided examples. This behavior, known as in-context learning, allows for performing nontrivial machine learning tasks during inference only. In this work,…

Large language models have shown tremendous performance in a variety of tasks. In-context learning -- the ability to improve at a task after being provided with a number of demonstrations -- is seen as one of the main contributors to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Julian Coda-Forno , Marcel Binz , Zeynep Akata , Matthew Botvinick , Jane X. Wang , Eric Schulz