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Instruction tuning is a widely used approach to improve the instruction-following ability of large language models (LLMs). Instruction-tuning datasets typically include a mixture of context-augmented and context-free examples, yet prior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Hyunji Lee , Seunghyun Yoon , Yunjae Won , Hanseok Oh , Geewook Kim , Trung Bui , Franck Dernoncourt , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal , Minjoon Seo

In-context learning (ICL) allows large models to adapt to tasks using a few examples, yet its extension to vision-language models (VLMs) remains fragile. Our analysis reveals that the fundamental limitation lies in an inductive gap, models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoyu Wang , Haonan Wang , Yuyan Chen , Jun Chen , Gang Liu , Qian Wang , Jiahong Yan , Yanghua Xiao

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Xingxuan Zhang , Haoran Wang , Jiansheng Li , Yuan Xue , Shikai Guan , Renzhe Xu , Hao Zou , Han Yu , Peng Cui

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

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

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

In-context learning based on attention models is examined for data with categorical outcomes, with inference in such models viewed from the perspective of functional gradient descent (GD). We develop a network composed of attention blocks,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-08 Aaron T. Wang , William Convertino , Xiang Cheng , Ricardo Henao , Lawrence Carin

This paper investigates context stickiness in in-context learning (ICL), a phenomenon where earlier examples in a prompt interfere with a transformer's ability to adapt to later tasks. Using synthetic regression tasks over linear and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Hanna Rød , Dagny Streit , Nils Valseth Selte , Justin Li

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable flexibility: they can adapt to novel tasks from in-context examples without any parameter updates, a capability known as in-context learning (ICL). Prior work on synthetic tasks has shown that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hua-Dong Xiong , Li Ji-An , Robert C. Wilson , Kwonjoon Lee , Xue-Xin Wei

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective approach to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness varies significantly across models and tasks, posing challenges for practitioners to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Dingzriui Wang , Xuanliang Zhang , Keyan Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Yang Deng

We argue that in-context learning (ICL) predictably arises from standard self-supervised next-token pretraining, rather than being an exotic emergent property. This work establishes the foundational principles of this emergence by focusing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Paul M. Riechers , Henry R. Bigelow , Eric A. Alt , Adam Shai

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 are powerful but their weights are often publicly unavailable and their immense sizes make the models difficult to be tuned with common hardware. As a result, effectively tuning these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Canwen Xu , Yichong Xu , Shuohang Wang , Yang Liu , Chenguang Zhu , Julian McAuley

In-context learning (ICL) describes a language model's ability to generate outputs based on a set of input demonstrations and a subsequent query. To understand this remarkable capability, researchers have studied simplified, stylized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Jaeyeon Kim , Sehyun Kwon , Joo Young Choi , Jongho Park , Jaewoong Cho , Jason D. Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to condition on a few in-context demonstrations (input-output examples of the underlying task) to generate the answer for a new query input, without updating parameters. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Yongqiang Chen , Binghui Xie , Kaiwen Zhou , Bo Han , Yatao Bian , James Cheng

Autoregressive transformers exhibit adaptive learning through in-context learning (ICL), which begs the question of how. Prior works have shown that transformers represent the ICL tasks as vectors in their representations. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Seungwook Han , Jinyeop Song , Jeff Gore , Pulkit Agrawal

While modern Transformer-based language models (LMs) have achieved major success in multi-task generalization, they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies within their context window. This work introduces a novel approach using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Alok N. Shah , Khush Gupta , Keshav Ramji , Pratik Chaudhari

An intriguing property of the Transformer is its ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), where the Transformer can solve different inference tasks without parameter updating based on the contextual information provided by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Renpu Liu , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

In-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) is a striking phenomenon, yet its underlying mechanisms remain only partially understood. Previous work connects linear self-attention (LSA) to gradient descent (GD), this connection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shifeng Xie , Rui Yuan , Simone Rossi , Thomas Hannagan

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Peiwen Yuan , Shaoxiong Feng , Yiwei Li , Xinglin Wang , Yueqi Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Heda Wang , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Samet Oymak , Ankit Singh Rawat , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Christos Thrampoulidis