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Related papers: In-context Learning and Induction Heads

200 papers

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong in-context learning capabilities, but how they track and retrieve information from context remains underexplored. Drawing on the free recall paradigm in cognitive science (where participants…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Anooshka Bajaj , Deven Mahesh Mistry , Sahaj Singh Maini , Yash Aggarwal , Billy Dickson , Zoran Tiganj

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for natural language processing. Part of their success is owed to a remarkable capability known as in-context learning (ICL): they can acquire and apply novel associations solely from their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Tiberiu Musat , Tiago Pimentel , Lorenzo Noci , Alessandro Stolfo , Mrinmaya Sachan , Thomas Hofmann

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning, the ability to use information provided as context to improve prediction of future tokens. Induction heads have been argued to play a crucial role for in-context learning in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Tankred Saanum , Can Demircan , Samuel J. Gershman , Eric Schulz

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Jie Ren , Qipeng Guo , Hang Yan , Dongrui Liu , Quanshi Zhang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin

Induction heads are attention heads that perform inductive copying by matching patterns from earlier context and copying their continuations verbatim. As models develop induction heads, they experience a sharp drop in training loss, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Kerem Sahin , Sheridan Feucht , Adam Belfki , Jannik Brinkmann , Aaron Mueller , David Bau , Chris Wendler

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations in the prompt. Two different mechanisms have been proposed to explain ICL: induction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kayo Yin , Jacob Steinhardt

Transformer models exhibit in-context learning: the ability to accurately predict the response to a novel query based on illustrative examples in the input sequence. In-context learning contrasts with traditional in-weights learning of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Gautam Reddy

In-context learning refers to the ability of a model to condition on a prompt sequence consisting of in-context examples (input-output pairs corresponding to some task) along with a new query input, and generate the corresponding output.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Shivam Garg , Dimitris Tsipras , Percy Liang , Gregory Valiant

Understanding connections between artificial and biological intelligent systems can reveal fundamental principles of general intelligence. While many artificial intelligence models have a neuroscience counterpart, such connections are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Li Ji-An , Corey Y. Zhou , Marcus K. Benna , Marcelo G. Mattar

Prior work on in-context copying has shown the existence of induction heads, which attend to and promote individual tokens during copying. In this work we discover a new type of induction head: concept-level induction heads, which copy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Sheridan Feucht , Eric Todd , Byron Wallace , David Bau

Induction head mechanism is a part of the computational circuits for in-context learning (ICL) that enable large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without fine-tuning. Most existing work explains the training dynamics behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Shuo Wang , Issei Sato

Large language models (LLMs) have shown a remarkable ability to learn and perform complex tasks through in-context learning (ICL). However, a comprehensive understanding of its internal mechanisms is still lacking. This paper explores the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Joy Crosbie , Ekaterina Shutova

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Michael Hahn , Navin Goyal

Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Shohei Taniguchi , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Transformers have exhibited exceptional capabilities in sequence modeling tasks, leveraging self-attention and in-context learning. Critical to this success are induction heads, attention circuits that enable copying tokens based on their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Francesco D'Angelo , Francesco Croce , Nicolas Flammarion

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

Large language models are able to exploit in-context learning to access external knowledge beyond their training data through retrieval-augmentation. While promising, its inner workings remain unclear. In this work, we shed light on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Patrick Kahardipraja , Reduan Achtibat , Thomas Wiegand , Wojciech Samek , Sebastian Lapuschkin

In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Kartik Ahuja , David Lopez-Paz

In-context learning is a powerful emergent ability in transformer models. Prior work in mechanistic interpretability has identified a circuit element that may be critical for in-context learning -- the induction head (IH), which performs a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Aaditya K. Singh , Ted Moskovitz , Felix Hill , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Andrew M. Saxe
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