English
Related papers

Related papers: The Learnability of In-Context Learning

200 papers

In-context learning, i.e., learning from context examples, is an impressive ability of Transformer. Training Transformers to possess this in-context learning skill is computationally intensive due to the occurrence of learning plateaus,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Jingwen Fu , Tao Yang , Yuwang Wang , Yan Lu , Nanning Zheng

Adapting one's thought process based on corrective feedback is an essential ability in human learning, particularly in collaborative settings. In contrast, the current large language model training paradigm relies heavily on modeling vast,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Martin Klissarov , Jonathan Cook , Diego Antognini , Hao Sun , Jingling Li , Natasha Jaques , Claudiu Musat , Edward Grefenstette

Multilingual generative models obtain remarkable cross-lingual in-context learning capabilities through pre-training on large-scale corpora. However, they still exhibit a performance bias toward high-resource languages and learn isolated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Chong Li , Shaonan Wang , Jiajun Zhang , Chengqing Zong

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

Despite the surprising few-shot performance of in-context learning (ICL), it is still a common practice to randomly sample examples to serve as context. This paper advocates a new principle for ICL: self-adaptive in-context learning. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Zhiyong Wu , Yaoxiang Wang , Jiacheng Ye , Lingpeng Kong

We introduce MetaICL (Meta-training for In-Context Learning), a new meta-training framework for few-shot learning where a pretrained language model is tuned to do in-context learning on a large set of training tasks. This meta-training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Sewon Min , Mike Lewis , Luke Zettlemoyer , Hannaneh Hajishirzi

We formalize a new concept for LLMs, context-enhanced learning. It involves standard gradient-based learning on text except that the context is enhanced with additional data on which no auto-regressive gradients are computed. This setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xingyu Zhu , Abhishek Panigrahi , Sanjeev Arora

In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Roee Hendel , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson

Long-context modeling is one of the critical capabilities of language AI for digesting and reasoning over complex information pieces. In practice, long-context capabilities are typically built into a pre-trained language model~(LM) through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Luyu Gao , Yunyi Zhang , Jamie Callan

In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are…

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Liuwang Kang , Fan Wang , Shaoshan Liu , Hung-Chyun Chou , Chuan Lin , Ning Ding

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

This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Josef Ott

Composing basic skills from simple tasks to accomplish composite tasks is crucial for modern intelligent systems. We investigate the in-context composition ability of language models to perform composite tasks that combine basic skills…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Zidong Liu , Zhuoyan Xu , Zhenmei Shi , Yingyu Liang

With a handful of demonstration examples, large-scale language models show strong capability to perform various tasks by in-context learning from these examples, without any fine-tuning. We demonstrate that in-context learning performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Yiming Zhang , Shi Feng , Chenhao Tan

One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to learn in-context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight update when these patterns are presented in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Benoit Dherin , Michael Munn , Hanna Mazzawi , Michael Wunder , Javier Gonzalvo

Large language models (LLMs) exploit in-context learning (ICL) to solve tasks with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not yet well-understood. Some works suggest that LLMs only recall already learned concepts from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Jane Pan , Tianyu Gao , Howard Chen , Danqi Chen

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

With the rise of large-scale models trained on broad data, in-context learning has become a new learning paradigm that has demonstrated significant potential in natural language processing and computer vision tasks. Meanwhile, in-context…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Zhongbin Fang , Xiangtai Li , Xia Li , Joachim M. Buhmann , Chen Change Loy , Mengyuan Liu

The in-context learning capabilities of modern language models have motivated a deeper mathematical understanding of sequence models. A line of recent work has shown that linear attention models can emulate projected gradient descent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Xiangyu Chang , Yingcong Li , Muti Kara , Samet Oymak , Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury