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Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, yet the quality of their predictions is fundamentally limited by the few costly labeled demonstrations that can fit into a prompt. Meanwhile, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Renpu Liu , Jing Yang

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie

Large transformer models pretrained on offline reinforcement learning datasets have demonstrated remarkable in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) capabilities, where they can make good decisions when prompted with interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Licong Lin , Yu Bai , Song Mei

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

Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Baturay Saglam , Xinyang Hu , Zhuoran Yang , Dionysis Kalogerias , Amin Karbasi

In-context learning (ICL) allows some autoregressive models to solve tasks via next-token prediction and without needing further training. This has led to claims about these model's ability to solve (learn) unseen tasks with only a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Adrian de Wynter

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of In-Context Learning (ICL) by addressing several open questions: (a) What type of ICL estimator is learned by large language models? (b) What is a proper performance metric for ICL and what…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-11 Yufeng Zhang , Fengzhuo Zhang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

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

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

Recent research has shown that Transformers with linear attention are capable of in-context learning (ICL) by implementing a linear estimator through gradient descent steps. However, the existing results on the optimization landscape apply…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yingcong Li , Ankit Singh Rawat , Samet Oymak

In-context learning (ICL) enables transformers to adapt to new tasks through contextual examples without parameter updates. While existing research has typically studied ICL in fixed-complexity environments, practical language models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Puneesh Deora , Bhavya Vasudeva , Tina Behnia , Christos Thrampoulidis

Transformers have become a standard architecture in machine learning, demonstrating strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities that allow them to learn from the prompt at inference time. However, uncertainty quantification for ICL remains…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-23 Zhe Huang , Simone Rossi , Rui Yuan , Thomas Hannagan

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

We investigate the transformer's capability to simulate the training process of deep models via in-context learning (ICL), i.e., in-context deep learning. Our key contribution is providing a positive example of using a transformer to train…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Weimin Wu , Maojiang Su , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Zhao Song , Han Liu

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

At present, the mechanisms of in-context learning in Transformers are not well understood and remain mostly an intuition. In this paper, we suggest that training Transformers on auto-regressive objectives is closely related to…

We investigate whether chemical processes can perform in-context learning (ICL), a mode of computation typically associated with transformer architectures. ICL allows a system to infer task-specific rules from a sequence of examples without…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-01-13 Carlos Floyd , Hector Manuel Lopez Rios , Aaron R. Dinner , Suriyanarayanan Vaikuntanathan

Transformers exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where these models solve new tasks by using examples in the prompt without additional training. In our work, we identify and analyze two key components of ICL: (1) context-scaling, where model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Amirhesam Abedsoltan , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Jingfeng Wu , Mikhail Belkin