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Related papers: The Learnability of In-Context Learning

200 papers

We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

In-context learning (ICL) has proven to be a significant capability with the advancement of Large Language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks without…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Quanyu Long , Jianda Chen , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

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 refers to the emerging ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform a target task without additional training, utilizing demonstrations of the task. Recent studies aim to enhance in-context learning performance by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Junyong Kang , Donghyun Son , Hwanjun Song , Buru Chang

Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Chi Han , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhao , Heng Ji

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

Large language models, comprising billions of parameters and pre-trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have been claimed to acquire certain capabilities without having been specifically trained on them. These capabilities, referred to as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Sheng Lu , Irina Bigoulaeva , Rachneet Sachdeva , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

We measure the performance of in-context learning as a function of task novelty and difficulty for open and closed questions. For that purpose, we created a novel benchmark consisting of hard scientific questions, each paired with a context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Xiang Li , Haoran Tang , Siyu Chen , Ziwei Wang , Ryan Chen , Marcin Abram

The capability of predicting environmental dynamics underpins both biological neural systems and general embodied AI in adapting to their surroundings. Yet prevailing approaches rest on static world models that falter when confronted with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Fan Wang , Zhiyuan Chen , Yuxuan Zhong , Sunjian Zheng , Pengtao Shao , Bo Yu , Shaoshan Liu , Jianan Wang , Ning Ding , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-24 Kaito Takanami , Takashi Takahashi , Yoshiyuki Kabashima

As large language models (LLMs) gain popularity in conducting prediction tasks in-context, understanding the sources of uncertainty in in-context learning becomes essential to ensuring reliability. The recent hypothesis of in-context…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-08 I. Shavindra Jayasekera , Jacob Si , Filippo Valdettaro , Wenlong Chen , A. Aldo Faisal , Yingzhen Li

In-context learning (ICL) empowers generative models to address new tasks effectively and efficiently on the fly, without relying on any artificially crafted optimization techniques. In this paper, we study extending ICL to address a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Fan Wang , Chuan Lin , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

The phenomena of in-context learning has typically been thought of as "learning from examples". In this work which focuses on Machine Translation, we present a perspective of in-context learning as the desired generation task maintaining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-08 Suzanna Sia , Kevin Duh

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

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

In-context learning is a popular inference strategy where large language models solve a task using only a few labeled demonstrations without needing any parameter updates. Although there have been extensive studies on English in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Miaoran Zhang , Vagrant Gautam , Mingyang Wang , Jesujoba O. Alabi , Xiaoyu Shen , Dietrich Klakow , Marius Mosbach

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have demonstrated remarkable abilities across diverse tasks, especially as they are scaled up. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art models struggle in certain cases,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Irina Bigoulaeva , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

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 have exhibited intriguing in-context learning capability, achieving promising zero- and few-shot performance without updating the parameters. However, conventional in-context learning is usually restricted by length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Yaru Hao , Yutao Sun , Li Dong , Zhixiong Han , Yuxian Gu , Furu Wei

Large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstrations provided at inference time. We study this in-context learning phenomenon through the lens of Gaussian Processes (GPs). We build controlled experiments where models observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Elif Akata , Konstantinos Voudouris , Vincent Fortuin , Eric Schulz