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Related papers: CausalLM is not optimal for in-context learning

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Although transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities for in-context learning (ICL) in practice, theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanism that allows transformers to perform ICL is still in its infancy. This work aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Shen , Ruida Zhou , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Modern large language model (LLM) applications increasingly rely on long conditioning prefixes to control model behavior at inference time. While prefix-augmented inference is effective, it incurs two structural limitations: i) the prefix's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yasuyuki Okoshi , Hao Mark Chen , Guanxi Lu , Hongxiang Fan , Masato Motomura , Daichi Fujiki

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 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

Recent progress has rapidly advanced our understanding of the mechanisms underlying in-context learning in modern attention-based neural networks. However, existing results focus exclusively on unimodal data; in contrast, the theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Nicholas Barnfield , Subhabrata Sen , Pragya Sur

Recent work has demonstrated that transformers and linear attention models can perform in-context learning (ICL) on simple function classes, such as linear regression. In this paper, we empirically study how these two attention mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Ayush Goel , Arjun Kohli , Sarvagya Somvanshi

We propose ContextLM, a framework that implicitly learns multi-token prediction by augmenting standard pretraining with an intrinsic next-context prediction objective. ContextLM builds a language model on top of context embeddings that span…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Beiya Dai , Yuliang Liu , Daozheng Xue , Yunchong Song , Qipeng Guo , Kai Chen , Xinbing Wang , Bowen Zhou , Zhouhan Lin

Causal Language Modeling (CLM) and Masked Language Modeling (MLM) are two mainstream learning paradigms based on Transformer networks, specifically the Decoder-only and Encoder-only architectures. The strengths of each paradigm in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Xinru Yu , Bin Guo , Shiwei Luo , Jie Wang , Tao Ji , Yuanbin Wu

When adapting large language models (LLMs) to a specific downstream task, two primary approaches are commonly employed: (1) prompt engineering, often with in-context few-shot learning, leveraging the model's inherent generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Jorg Bornschein , Clare Lyle , Yazhe Li , Amal Rannen-Triki , Xu Owen He , Razvan Pascanu

Context-based fine-tuning methods, including prompting, in-context learning, soft prompting (also known as prompt tuning), and prefix-tuning, have gained popularity due to their ability to often match the performance of full fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Aleksandar Petrov , Philip H. S. Torr , Adel Bibi

Autoregressive (AR) language models and Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) constitute the two principal paradigms of large language models. However, both paradigms suffer from insufficient reasoning capabilities. Human reasoning inherently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Kairong Han , Nuanqiao Shan , Ziyu Zhao , Zijing Hu , Xinpeng Dong , Junjian Ye , Lujia Pan , Fei Wu , Kun Kuang

The binary exponential backoff scheme is widely used in WiFi 7 and still incurs poor throughput performance under dynamic channel environments. Recent model-based approaches (e.g., non-persistent and $p$-persistent CSMA) simply optimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Shugang Hao , Hongbo Li , Lingjie Duan

Even though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in solving various natural language tasks, the capability of an LLM to follow human instructions is still a concern. Recent works have shown great improvements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Xinbo Wu , Lav R. Varshney

This work builds together two popular blocks of neural architecture, namely convolutional layers and Transformers, for large language models (LLMs). Non-causal conformers are used ubiquitously in automatic speech recognition. This work aims…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Prateek Verma

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

Transformers suffer from a high computational cost that grows with sequence length for self-attention, making inference in long streams prohibited by memory consumption. Constant-memory alternatives such as RNNs and SSMs compress history…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Zhixin Zhang , Shabo Zhang , Chengcan Wu , Zeming Wei , Meng Sun

Transformers have demonstrated a strong ability for in-context learning (ICL), enabling models to solve previously unseen tasks using only example input output pairs provided at inference time. While prior theoretical work has established…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rushil Chandrupatla , Leo Bangayan , Sebastian Leng

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Michael Hahn , Navin Goyal

Large pre-training language models (PLMs) have shown promising in-context learning abilities. However, due to the backbone transformer architecture, existing PLMs are bottlenecked by the memory and computational cost when scaling up to a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Mukai Li , Shansan Gong , Jiangtao Feng , Yiheng Xu , Jun Zhang , Zhiyong Wu , Lingpeng Kong

In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Kartik Ahuja , David Lopez-Paz