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Self-supervised large language models have demonstrated the ability to perform Machine Translation (MT) via in-context learning, but little is known about where the model performs the task with respect to prompt instructions and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Suzanna Sia , David Mueller , Kevin Duh

Large language models (LLMs) exploit in-context learning (ICL) to solve tasks with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not yet well-understood. Some works suggest that LLMs only recall already learned concepts from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Jane Pan , Tianyu Gao , Howard Chen , Danqi Chen

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for easily adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to various tasks. However, our understanding of how ICL works remains limited. We explore a simple model of ICL in a controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Omar Naim , Guilhem Fouilhé , Nicholas Asher

In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are…

In-context learning, where pre-trained language models learn to perform tasks from task examples and instructions in their contexts, has attracted much attention in the NLP community. However, the ability of in-context learning is not fully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Minlie Huang

In-context learning is a powerful capability of certain machine learning models that arguably underpins the success of today's frontier AI models. However, in-context learning is critically limited to settings where the in-context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Rylan Schaeffer , Mikail Khona , Sanmi Koyejo

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Eric J. Bigelow , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka , Tomer D. Ullman

In-context learning is the ability of a pretrained model to adapt to novel and diverse downstream tasks by conditioning on prompt examples, without optimizing any parameters. While large language models have demonstrated this ability, how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Qian Huang , Hongyu Ren , Peng Chen , Gregor Kržmanc , Daniel Zeng , Percy Liang , Jure Leskovec

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in language modeling tasks. However, the reasons behind their tremendous success are still unclear. In this paper, towards a better understanding, we train a Transformer model on a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-06 Michael E. Sander , Raja Giryes , Taiji Suzuki , Mathieu Blondel , Gabriel Peyré

In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yingcong Li , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

Transformers have emerged as the dominant architecture in the field of deep learning, with a broad range of applications and remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. While not yet fully understood, ICL has already proved to be an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Arik Reuter , Tim G. J. Rudner , Vincent Fortuin , David Rügamer

Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Damai Dai , Yutao Sun , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Shuming Ma , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understandably, a swath of research has been dedicated to uncovering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Jiaoda Li , Yifan Hou , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

It has recently been demonstrated empirically that in-context learning emerges in transformers when certain distributional properties are present in the training data, but this ability can also diminish upon further training. We provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Bryan Chan , Xinyi Chen , András György , Dale Schuurmans

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance in natural language processing, making them highly effective in many human life-related or even job-related tasks. The attention mechanism in the Transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Shuai Li , Zhao Song , Yu Xia , Tong Yu , Tianyi Zhou

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi