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Large language models (LLMs) are capable to perform complex reasoning by in-context learning (ICL) when provided with a few input-output demonstrations (demos) and more powerful when intermediate reasoning steps ("chain of thoughts (CoT)")…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Jiuhai Chen , Lichang Chen , Chen Zhu , Tianyi Zhou

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance improvement through in-context learning (ICL) by leveraging task-specific examples in the input. However, the mechanisms behind this improvement remain elusive. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Safoora Yousefi , Leo Betthauser , Hosein Hasanbeig , Raphaël Millière , Ida Momennejad

Large language models (LLMs) operate in two fundamental learning modes - fine-tuning (FT) and in-context learning (ICL) - raising key questions about which mode yields greater language proficiency and whether they differ in their inductive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bishwamittra Ghosh , Soumi Das , Till Speicher , Qinyuan Wu , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Deepak Garg , Krishna P. Gummadi , Evimaria Terzi

Contextual information at inference time, such as demonstrations, retrieved knowledge, or interaction history, can substantially improve large language models (LLMs) without parameter updates, yet its theoretical role remains poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dingzirui Wang , Xuanliang Zhang , Keyan Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Yang Deng

Large language models (LLMs) perform in-context learning (ICL) with minimal supervised examples, which benefits various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. One of the critical research focus is the selection of prompt demonstrations.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Haoyang Chen , Richong Zhang , Junfan Chen

In-context learning (ICL) is often motivated by the intuition that demonstrations help because they provide correct input-output examples. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: correctness does not guarantee exemplar utility,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Chenghao Qiu , Chunli Peng , Yufeng Yang , Kuan-Hao Huang , Yi Zhou

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) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) are two common strategies for improving the performance of modern large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. Despite their different natures, these strategies often lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Diego Doimo , Alessandro Serra , Alessio Ansuini , Alberto Cazzaniga

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

Recent studies demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can excel in many tasks via in-context learning (ICL). However, recent works show that ICL-prompted models tend to produce inaccurate results when presented with adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Xuanli He , Yuxiang Wu , Oana-Maria Camburu , Pasquale Minervini , Pontus Stenetorp

Recent work has questioned whether large language models (LLMs) can perform genuine in-context learning (ICL) for scientific experimental design, with prior studies suggesting that LLM-based agents exhibit no sensitivity to experimental…

In-context learning (ICL) is a crucial capability of current large language models (LLMs), where the selection of examples plays a key role in performance. While most existing approaches focus on selecting the most similar examples to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Wenyang Xiao , Haoyu Zhao , Lingxiao Huang

Many-shot in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a unique setup to both utilize and test the ability of large language models to handle long context. This paper delves into long-context language model (LCLM) evaluation through many-shot…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Kaijian Zou , Muhammad Khalifa , Lu Wang

In-context learning (ICL) for text classification, which uses a few input-label demonstrations to describe a task, has demonstrated impressive performance on large language models (LLMs). However, the selection of in-context demonstrations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Ye Jiang , Taihang Wang , Youzheng Liu , Yimin Wang , Yuhan Xia , Yunfei Long

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on natural language tasks can be improved through both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and in-context learning (ICL), which operate via distinct mechanisms. Supervised fine-tuning updates the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Saahith Janapati , Yangfeng Ji

In-context learning (ICL) ability has emerged with the increasing scale of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to learn input-label mappings from demonstrations and perform well on downstream tasks. However, under the standard ICL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Yifan Wang , Qingyan Guo , Xinzhe Ni , Chufan Shi , Lemao Liu , Haiyun Jiang , Yujiu Yang

Transformer-based multimodal large language models often exhibit in-context learning (ICL) abilities. Motivated by this phenomenon, we ask: how do transformers learn to associate information across modalities from in-context examples? We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yiran Huang , Karsten Roth , Quentin Bouniot , Wenjia Xu , Zeynep Akata

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi

In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Hakaze Cho , Mariko Kato , Yoshihiro Sakai , Naoya Inoue

In-context learning (ICL) is an effective approach to help large language models (LLMs) adapt to various tasks by providing demonstrations of the target task. Considering the high cost of labeling demonstrations, many methods propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Dingzirui Wang , Xuanliang Zhang , Qiguang Chen , Longxu Dou , Xiao Xu , Rongyu Cao , Yingwei Ma , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Binhua Li , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li