English
Related papers

Related papers: A Closer Look at In-Context Learning under Distrib…

200 papers

Transformer models are now a cornerstone in natural language processing. Yet, explaining their decisions remains a challenge. It was shown recently that the same model trained on the same data with a different randomness can lead to very…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Romain Loncour , Jérémie Bogaert , François-Xavier Standaert

Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Alberto Bietti , Vivien Cabannes , Diane Bouchacourt , Herve Jegou , Leon Bottou

Transformers have a remarkable ability to learn and execute tasks based on examples provided within the input itself, without explicit prior training. It has been argued that this capability, known as in-context learning (ICL), is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-06 Yue M. Lu , Mary I. Letey , Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Anindita Maiti , Cengiz Pehlevan

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

Recently, the mysterious In-Context Learning (ICL) ability exhibited by Transformer architectures, especially in large language models (LLMs), has sparked significant research interest. However, the resilience of Transformers' in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Chen Cheng , Xinzhi Yu , Haodong Wen , Jingsong Sun , Guanzhang Yue , Yihao Zhang , Zeming Wei

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

Large language models (LLMs) like transformers demonstrate impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, allowing them to make predictions for new tasks based on prompt exemplars without parameter updates. While existing ICL theories…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Kevin Christian Wibisono , Yixin Wang

Low-resource languages pose a challenge for machine translation with large language models (LLMs), which require large amounts of training data. One potential way to circumvent this data dependence is to rely on LLMs' ability to use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Jackson Petty , Jaulie Goe , Tal Linzen

Several recent works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate iterations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Hadi Daneshmand , Suvrit Sra

Large transformer models trained on diverse datasets have shown a remarkable ability to learn in-context, achieving high few-shot performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained to solve. In this paper, we study the in-context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Jonathan N. Lee , Annie Xie , Aldo Pacchiano , Yash Chandak , Chelsea Finn , Ofir Nachum , Emma Brunskill

The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Paul Michel

Some autoregressive models exhibit in-context learning capabilities: being able to learn as an input sequence is processed, without undergoing any parameter changes, and without being explicitly trained to do so. The origins of this…

Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wei Shi , Yuan Cao

A striking property of transformers is their ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), a machine learning framework in which the learner is presented with a novel context during inference implicitly through some data, and tasked with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Liam Collins , Advait Parulekar , Aryan Mokhtari , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai

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 pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Damai Dai , Yutao Sun , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Shuming Ma , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Guangyu Li , Meng Ding , Lijie Hu

Transformer-based models have transformed the landscape of natural language processing (NLP) and are increasingly applied to computer vision tasks with remarkable success. These models, renowned for their ability to capture long-range…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Gracile Astlin Pereira , Muhammad Hussain

This paper explores the elusive mechanism underpinning in-context learning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Our work provides a novel perspective by examining in-context learning via the lens of surface repetitions. We quantitatively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Jianhao Yan , Jin Xu , Chiyu Song , Chenming Wu , Yafu Li , Yue Zhang

The starting point of our network architecture is the Credibility Transformer which extends the classical Transformer architecture by a credibility mechanism to improve model learning and predictive performance. This Credibility Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kishan Padayachy , Ronald Richman , Salvatore Scognamiglio , Mario V. Wüthrich