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Related papers: What Can Transformers Learn In-Context? A Case Stu…

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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

Large language models are able to perform a task by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations - a paradigm known as in-context learning. We show that language models can explicitly infer an underlying task from a few demonstrations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Or Honovich , Uri Shaham , Samuel R. Bowman , Omer Levy

Large language models are able to learn new tasks in context, where they are provided with instructions and a few annotated examples. However, the effectiveness of in-context learning is dependent on the provided context, and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Afra Amini , Massimiliano Ciaramita

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

Transformer-based language models excel at in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to new tasks based on contextual examples, without parameter updates. In a specific form of ICL, which we refer to as \textit{contextual recall},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Bhavya Vasudeva , Puneesh Deora , Alberto Bietti , Vatsal Sharan , Christos Thrampoulidis

Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based models in various real-world tasks, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent studies have suggested that transformers can implement gradient descent as an in-context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Xingwu Chen , Lei Zhao , Difan Zou

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to learn new tasks from examples in its input without any parameter updates. In contrast to previous theories of ICL relying on toy models and data settings, recently it has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Francesco Innocenti , El Mehdi Achour

In-context learning \ -- performing tasks based on examples given in the prompt \ -- is an important capability that has emerged in large language models and has received significant attention in both theory and practice. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Ruomin Huang , Eshaan Nichani , Jason D. Lee , Rong Ge

In-context learning can improve the performances of knowledge-rich tasks such as question answering. In such scenarios, in-context examples trigger a language model (LM) to surface information stored in its parametric knowledge. We study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Yoonsang Lee , Pranav Atreya , Xi Ye , Eunsol Choi

Recent Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) demonstrate in-context learning ability to perform various functions based solely on the provided context, without updating model parameters. To fully utilize the in-context capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Yan Sun , Shihao Yang

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie

In this work, we explore the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks that were not encountered during training. To achieve this, we conduct synthetic experiments where the objective is to learn OOD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Qixun Wang , Yifei Wang , Yisen Wang , Xianghua Ying

Some autoregressive models exhibit in-context learning capabilities: being able to learn as an input sequence is processed, without undergoing any parameter changes, and without being explicitly trained to do so. The origins of this…

In-context learning (ICL) has revolutionized the capabilities of transformer models in NLP. In our project, we extend the understanding of the mechanisms underpinning ICL by exploring whether transformers can learn from sequential,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Ryan Campbell , Emma Guo , Evan Hu , Reya Vir , Ethan Hsiao

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Chenyang Zhang , Yuan Cao

Large Pre-trained Transformers exhibit an intriguing capacity for in-context learning. Without gradient updates, these models can rapidly construct new predictors from demonstrations presented in the inputs. Recent works promote this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Yi-Syuan Chen , Yun-Zhu Song , Cheng Yu Yeo , Bei Liu , Jianlong Fu , Hong-Han Shuai

Neural sequence models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) abilities, where they can perform new tasks when prompted with training and test examples, without any parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Yu Bai , Fan Chen , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Song Mei

In-context learning is a popular inference strategy where large language models solve a task using only a few labeled demonstrations without needing any parameter updates. Although there have been extensive studies on English in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Miaoran Zhang , Vagrant Gautam , Mingyang Wang , Jesujoba O. Alabi , Xiaoyu Shen , Dietrich Klakow , Marius Mosbach

Selecting or designing an appropriate domain adaptation algorithm for a given problem remains challenging. This paper presents a Transformer model that can provably approximate and opt for domain adaptation methods for a given dataset in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Ryuichiro Hataya , Kota Matsui , Masaaki Imaizumi

Test-time training (TTT) methods explicitly update the weights of a model to adapt to the specific test instance, and they have found success in a variety of settings, including most recently language modeling and reasoning. To demystify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Halil Alperen Gozeten , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Xuechen Zhang , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Marco Mondelli , Samet Oymak