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Related papers: Pre-Training to Learn in Context

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In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 William L. Tong , Cengiz Pehlevan

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

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

Fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) are two prevalent methods in imbuing large language models with task-specific knowledge. It is commonly believed that fine-tuning can surpass ICL given sufficient training samples as it allows the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Qingyu Yin , Xuzheng He , Luoao Deng , Chak Tou Leong , Fan Wang , Yanzhao Yan , Xiaoyu Shen , Qiang Zhang

Speech foundation models have recently demonstrated the ability to perform Speech In-Context Learning (SICL). Selecting effective in-context examples is crucial for SICL performance, yet selection methodologies remain underexplored. In this…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-18 Haolong Zheng , Yekaterina Yegorova , Mark Hasegawa-Johnson

Large Pre-trained Transformers exhibit an intriguing capacity for in-context learning. Without gradient updates, these models can rapidly construct new predictors from demonstrations presented in the inputs. Recent works promote this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Yi-Syuan Chen , Yun-Zhu Song , Cheng Yu Yeo , Bei Liu , Jianlong Fu , Hong-Han Shuai

With in-context learning ability, the performance of large language models can be significantly boosted when provided with appropriate context. However, existing in-context learning methods mainly rely on human-provided contexts, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Jinghan Yang , Shuming Ma , Furu Wei

Generating rational and generally accurate responses to tasks, often accompanied by example demonstrations, highlights Large Language Model's (LLM's) remarkable In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities without requiring updates to the model's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Debanjan Dutta , Faizanuddin Ansari , Swagatam Das

Language models significantly benefit from context tokens, such as prompts or scratchpads. They perform better when prompted with informative instructions, and they acquire new reasoning capabilities by generating a scratch-pad before…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Charlie Snell , Dan Klein , Ruiqi Zhong

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

Instruction following is a critical ability for Large Language Models to perform downstream tasks. The standard approach to instruction tuning has relied on a specific phase of supervised fine-tuning over curated instruction datasets,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-01 David Ponce , Thierry Etchegoyhen

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables pretrained LLMs to adapt to downstream tasks by conditioning on a small set of input-output demonstrations, without any parameter updates. Although there have been many theoretical efforts to explain how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Xuhan Tong , Yuchen Zeng , Jiawei Zhang

In-context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for performing natural language tasks with Large Language Models (LLM) without updating the models' parameters, in contrast to the traditional gradient-based finetuning. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Georgios Chochlakis , Alexandros Potamianos , Kristina Lerman , Shrikanth Narayanan

In-context learning (ICL) allows a language model to improve its problem-solving capability when provided with suitable information in context. Since the choice of in-context information can be determined based on the problem itself,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Yinghui He , Abhishek Panigrahi , Yong Lin , Sanjeev Arora

In-Context Learning (ICL) combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved promising results on various NLP tasks. However, ICL requires high-quality annotated demonstrations which might not be available in real-world scenarios.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Dawei Li , Yaxuan Li , Dheeraj Mekala , Shuyao Li , Yulin wang , Xueqi Wang , William Hogan , Jingbo Shang

Large language models (LLMs) can perform a new task by merely conditioning on task instructions and a few input-output examples, without optimizing any parameters. This is called In-Context Learning (ICL). In-context Information Extraction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Chaoxu Pang , Yixuan Cao , Qiang Ding , Ping Luo

With approximately 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, current large language models (LLMs) support only a small subset. Prior research indicates LLMs can learn new languages for certain tasks without supervised data. We extend this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhaolin Li , Jan Niehues

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 is a recent paradigm in natural language understanding, where a large pre-trained language model (LM) observes a test instance and a few training examples as its input, and directly decodes the output without any update…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Ohad Rubin , Jonathan Herzig , Jonathan Berant

Language models are aligned to the collective voice of many, resulting in generic outputs that do not align with specific users' styles. In this work, we present Trial-Error-Explain In-Context Learning (TICL), a tuning-free method that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Hyundong Cho , Karishma Sharma , Nicolaas Jedema , Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro , Alessandro Moschitti , Ravi Krishnan , Jonathan May