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Large language models (LLMs) have been widely explored for embedding generation. While recent studies show that in-context learning (ICL) effectively enhances the representational capability of LLMs by prepending a few task-related…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ailiang Lin , Zhuoyun Li , Keyu Mao , Kotaro Funakoshi , Manabu Okumura

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

The ability of language models to learn a task from a few examples in context has generated substantial interest. Here, we provide a perspective that situates this type of supervised few-shot learning within a much broader spectrum of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Andrew Kyle Lampinen , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Aaditya K. Singh , Murray Shanahan

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in learning from explanations in prompts, but there has been limited understanding of exactly how these explanations function or why they are effective. This work aims to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Xi Ye , Srinivasan Iyer , Asli Celikyilmaz , Ves Stoyanov , Greg Durrett , Ramakanth Pasunuru

We study how large language models (LLMs) reason about memorized knowledge through simple binary relations such as equality ($=$), inequality ($<$), and inclusion ($\subset$). Unlike in-context reasoning, the axioms (e.g., $a < b, b < c$)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Jonathan Shaki , Emanuele La Malfa , Michael Wooldridge , Sarit Kraus

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for easily adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to various tasks. However, our understanding of how ICL works remains limited. We explore a simple model of ICL in a controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Omar Naim , Guilhem Fouilhé , Nicholas Asher

Transformers have demonstrated a strong ability for in-context learning (ICL), enabling models to solve previously unseen tasks using only example input output pairs provided at inference time. While prior theoretical work has established…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rushil Chandrupatla , Leo Bangayan , Sebastian Leng

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to acquire sequence-level planning abilities during training, yet their planning behavior exhibited at inference time often appears short-sighted and inconsistent with these capabilities. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haijiang Yan , Jian-Qiao Zhu , Adam Sanborn

Going beyond mimicking limited human experiences, recent studies show initial evidence that, like humans, large language models (LLMs) are capable of improving their abilities purely by self-correction, i.e., correcting previous responses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Yifei Wang , Yuyang Wu , Zeming Wei , Stefanie Jegelka , Yisen Wang

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

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning (ICL), a supervised learning technique that relies on adding annotated examples to the model context. We investigate a contextual bandit version of in-context reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Giovanni Monea , Antoine Bosselut , Kianté Brantley , Yoav Artzi

In-context learning, where pre-trained language models learn to perform tasks from task examples and instructions in their contexts, has attracted much attention in the NLP community. However, the ability of in-context learning is not fully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Minlie Huang

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

The predictions of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks often improve significantly when including examples of the input--label relationship in the context. However, there is currently no consensus about how this in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Jannik Kossen , Yarin Gal , Tom Rainforth

Many recent language models (LMs) of Transformers family exhibit so-called in-context learning (ICL) ability, manifested in the LMs' ability to modulate their function by a task described in a natural language input. Previous work curating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Michal Štefánik , Marek Kadlčík

In-context learning has been recognized as a key factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). It refers to the model's ability to learn patterns on the fly from provided in-context examples in the prompt during inference. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Bo Chen , Xiaoyu Li , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables transformer-based language models to adapt to new tasks by conditioning on demonstration examples. However, traditional example-driven in-context learning lacks explicit modules for knowledge retrieval and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Pan Chen , Shaohong Chen , Mark Wang , Shi Xuan Leong , Priscilla Fung , Varinia Bernales , Alan Aspuru-Guzik

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 recent years, large-scale language models (LLMs) have gained attention for their impressive text generation capabilities. However, these models often face the challenge of "hallucination," which undermines their reliability. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yuchen Yang , Houqiang Li , Yanfeng Wang , Yu Wang