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Transformer-based language models excel at in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to new tasks based on contextual examples, without parameter updates. In a specific form of ICL, which we refer to as \textit{contextual recall},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Bhavya Vasudeva , Puneesh Deora , Alberto Bietti , Vatsal Sharan , Christos Thrampoulidis

In-context learning (ICL) exhibits dual operating modes: task learning, i.e., acquiring a new skill from in-context samples, and task retrieval, i.e., locating and activating a relevant pretrained skill. Recent theoretical work investigates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Ziqian Lin , Kangwook Lee

In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we study the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-03 Juno Kim , Tai Nakamaki , Taiji Suzuki

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective approach to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness varies significantly across models and tasks, posing challenges for practitioners to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Dingzriui Wang , Xuanliang Zhang , Keyan Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Yang Deng

Motivated by in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), multimodal LLMs with additional visual modality are also exhibited with similar ICL abilities when multiple image-text pairs are provided as…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Nan Xu , Fei Wang , Sheng Zhang , Hoifung Poon , Muhao Chen

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, adapting to new tasks by simply conditioning on demonstrations without parameter updates. Compelling empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that ICL, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Taejong Joo , Diego Klabjan

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 (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

Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions. We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Daniel Wurgaft , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Core Francisco Park , Hidenori Tanaka , Gautam Reddy , Noah D. Goodman

Ever since the development of GPT-3 in the natural language processing (NLP) field, in-context learning (ICL) has played an essential role in utilizing large language models (LLMs). By presenting the LM utterance-label demonstrations at the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-18 Ming-Hao Hsu , Kai-Wei Chang , Shang-Wen Li , Hung-yi Lee

In-context learning (ICL) with dynamically selected demonstrations combines the flexibility of prompting large language models (LLMs) with the ability to leverage training data to improve performance. While ICL has been highly successful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Shivanshu Gupta , Sameer Singh , Ashish Sabharwal , Tushar Khot , Ben Bogin

In-Context Learning (ICL) enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) with demonstrations. However, obtaining these demonstrations primarily relies on manual effort. In most real-world scenarios, users are often unwilling or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Jinglong Gao , Xiao Ding , Lingxiao Zou , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

In-context learning (ICL) i.e. showing LLMs only a few task-specific demonstrations has led to downstream gains with no task-specific fine-tuning required. However, LLMs are sensitive to the choice of prompts, and therefore a crucial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Lingyu Gao , Aditi Chaudhary , Krishna Srinivasan , Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

In-context learning (ICL) has proven to be an effective strategy for improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) with no additional training. However, the exact mechanism behind this performance improvement remains unclear.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Shahriar Golchin , Mihai Surdeanu , Steven Bethard , Eduardo Blanco , Ellen Riloff

In-Context Learning (ICL) has significantly expanded the general-purpose nature of large language models, allowing them to adapt to novel tasks using merely the inputted context. This has motivated a series of papers that analyze tractable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Core Francisco Park , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Itamar Pres , Hidenori Tanaka

Real-world applications of large language models (LLMs) in computational social science (CSS) tasks primarily depend on the effectiveness of instruction tuning (IT) or in-context learning (ICL). While IT has shown highly effective at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Taihang Wang , Xiaoman Xu , Yimin Wang , Ye Jiang

In-context learning (ICL) emerges as a promising capability of large language models (LLMs) by providing them with demonstration examples to perform diverse tasks. However, the underlying mechanism of how LLMs learn from the provided…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Lean Wang , Lei Li , Damai Dai , Deli Chen , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Xu Sun

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

In-context learning (ICL) can significantly enhance the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), with the key lying in the selection and ordering of demonstration examples. Previous methods typically relied on simple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Xuetao Ma , Wenbin Jiang , Hua Huang

While large language models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, understandings of such capabilities are still in an early stage, where existing theory and mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Tianyu Guo , Wei Hu , Song Mei , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Silvio Savarese , Yu Bai