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In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Faris Chaudhry , Siddhant Gadkari

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling few-shot learning without the need for gradient updates. Despite its advantages, the effectiveness of ICL heavily depends on the choice of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Vinay M. S. , Minh-Hao Van , Xintao Wu

Recently, the mysterious In-Context Learning (ICL) ability exhibited by Transformer architectures, especially in large language models (LLMs), has sparked significant research interest. However, the resilience of Transformers' in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Chen Cheng , Xinzhi Yu , Haodong Wen , Jingsong Sun , Guanzhang Yue , Yihao Zhang , Zeming Wei

This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Tomoya Wakayama , Taiji Suzuki

In-context learning (ICL) exhibits dual operating modes: task learning, i.e., acquiring a new skill from in-context samples, and task retrieval, i.e., locating and activating a relevant pretrained skill. Recent theoretical work investigates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Ziqian Lin , Kangwook Lee

Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions. We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Daniel Wurgaft , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Core Francisco Park , Hidenori Tanaka , Gautam Reddy , Noah D. Goodman

Understanding in-context learning (ICL) capability that enables large language models (LLMs) to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples is of utmost importance. This importance stems not only from the better utilization of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yuxiang Zhou , Jiazheng Li , Yanzheng Xiang , Hanqi Yan , Lin Gui , Yulan He

Large pretrained language models (LMs) have shown impressive In-Context Learning (ICL) ability, where the model learns to do an unseen task via a prompt consisting of input-output examples as the demonstration, without any parameter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Jiacheng Ye , Zhiyong Wu , Jiangtao Feng , Tao Yu , Lingpeng Kong

In-context learning (ICL) is a pivotal capability for the practical deployment of large-scale language models, yet its reliability can vary substantially with the number of demonstrations provided in the prompt. A central obstacle is that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Tongxi Wang , Zhuoyang Xia

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) have achieved promising results in sentiment analysis through the in-context learning (ICL) paradigm. However, their ability to distinguish subtle sentiments still remains a challenge. Inspired by the human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Hongling Xu , Qianlong Wang , Yice Zhang , Min Yang , Xi Zeng , Bing Qin , Ruifeng Xu

In-context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability alongside the development of scaled-up large language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Quanyu Long , Yin Wu , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning (IWL), where memorized information is encoded in model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Suraj Anand , Michael A. Lepori , Jack Merullo , Ellie Pavlick

Shortcut learning refers to the phenomenon where models employ simple, non-robust decision rules in practical tasks, which hinders their generalization and robustness. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) in recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Rui Song , Yingji Li , Lida Shi , Fausto Giunchiglia , Hao Xu

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

There has been increasing interest in exploring the capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) in the field of information extraction (IE), specifically focusing on tasks related to named entity recognition (NER) and relation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Ying Mo , Jiahao Liu , Jian Yang , Qifan Wang , Shun Zhang , Jingang Wang , Zhoujun Li

In-context Learning (ICL) is the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform new tasks when conditioned on prompts comprising a few task examples. However, ICL performance can be critically sensitive to the choice of examples. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Shivanshu Gupta , Clemens Rosenbaum , Ethan R. Elenberg

In-context learning (ICL) is highly sensitive to which demonstrations appear in the prompt, but selecting them is expensive because the space of possible demonstration contexts and combinations is enormous. We argue that demonstration…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Haochun Wang , Chaofen Yang , Jiatong Liu , Jingbo Wang , Zewen Qiang , Sendong Zhao , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

We propose to improve in-context learning (ICL) by optimizing the continuous embeddings of a fixed few-shot prompt at test time. The key observation is that the log-probabilities a model assigns to its demonstrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Baturay Saglam , Dionysis Kalogerias

Regression and Bayesian accounts of in-context learning (ICL) explain how demonstrations can induce predictors, while mechanistic analyses often identify compact activation directions that steer prompted behavior. However, it remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Wei Tang , Xinyan Jiang , Fakhri Karray , Lijie Hu