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Transformers are deep architectures that define "in-context mappings" which enable predicting new tokens based on a given set of tokens (such as a prompt in NLP applications or a set of patches for a vision transformer). In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Takashi Furuya , Maarten V. de Hoop , Gabriel Peyré

In-context learning is a remarkable capability of transformers, referring to their ability to adapt to specific tasks based on a short history or context. Previous research has found that task-specific information is locally encoded within…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Liu Yang , Ziqian Lin , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Robert Nowak

Large language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning, where they learn to solve tasks given a few examples. Recent work has shown that transformers can be trained to perform simple regression tasks in-context. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Hrayr Harutyunyan , Rafayel Darbinyan , Samvel Karapetyan , Hrant Khachatrian

We investigate the mechanisms that arise when transformers are trained to solve arithmetic on sequences where tokens are variables whose meaning is determined only through their interactions in-context. While prior work has studied…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Eric Todd , Jannik Brinkmann , Rohit Gandikota , David Bau

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) 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

Modern machine learning requires system designers to specify aspects of the learning pipeline, such as losses, architectures, and optimizers. Meta-learning, or learning-to-learn, instead aims to learn those aspects, and promises to unlock…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Louis Kirsch , James Harrison , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein , Luke Metz

Despite the recent progress in long-context language models, it remains elusive how transformer-based models exhibit the capability to retrieve relevant information from arbitrary locations within the long context. This paper aims to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Wenhao Wu , Yizhong Wang , Guangxuan Xiao , Hao Peng , Yao Fu

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…

Large transformer-based models are able to perform in-context few-shot learning, without being explicitly trained for it. This observation raises the question: what aspects of the training regime lead to this emergent behavior? Here, we…

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful models that can learn concepts at the inference stage via in-context learning (ICL). While theoretical studies, e.g., \cite{zhang2023trained}, attempt to explain the mechanism of ICL, they assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yue Xing , Xiaofeng Lin , Chenheng Xu , Namjoon Suh , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters. Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Noam Wies , Yoav Levine , Amnon Shashua

The starting point of our network architecture is the Credibility Transformer which extends the classical Transformer architecture by a credibility mechanism to improve model learning and predictive performance. This Credibility Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kishan Padayachy , Ronald Richman , Salvatore Scognamiglio , Mario V. Wüthrich

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Sewon Min , Xinxi Lyu , Ari Holtzman , Mikel Artetxe , Mike Lewis , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Luke Zettlemoyer

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 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

Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. This success has contributed to the belief that "bigger means…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hemanth Saratchandran , Damien Teney , Simon Lucey

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

Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Alberto Bietti , Vivien Cabannes , Diane Bouchacourt , Herve Jegou , Leon Bottou

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