English
Related papers

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

200 papers

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Peiwen Yuan , Shaoxiong Feng , Yiwei Li , Xinglin Wang , Yueqi Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Heda Wang , Yao Hu , Kan Li

In-context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability alongside the development of scaled-up large language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Quanyu Long , Yin Wu , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

Large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstrations provided at inference time. We study this in-context learning phenomenon through the lens of Gaussian Processes (GPs). We build controlled experiments where models observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Elif Akata , Konstantinos Voudouris , Vincent Fortuin , Eric Schulz

In-context learning (ICL) is an emerging capability of large autoregressive language models where a few input-label demonstrations are appended to the input to enhance the model's understanding of downstream NLP tasks, without directly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Zhuocheng Gong , Jiahao Liu , Qifan Wang , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

Recursive processing is considered a hallmark of human linguistic abilities. A recent study evaluated recursive processing in recurrent neural language models (RNN-LMs) and showed that such models perform below chance level on embedded…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Yair Lakretz , Théo Desbordes , Dieuwke Hupkes , Stanislas Dehaene

In-context learning enables language models (LM) to adapt to downstream data or tasks by incorporating few samples as demonstrations within the prompts. It offers strong performance without the expense of fine-tuning. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Jian Gu , Aldeida Aleti , Chunyang Chen , Hongyu Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in learning from explanations in prompts, but there has been limited understanding of exactly how these explanations function or why they are effective. This work aims to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Xi Ye , Srinivasan Iyer , Asli Celikyilmaz , Ves Stoyanov , Greg Durrett , Ramakanth Pasunuru

Large language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning, where they learn to solve tasks given a few examples. Recent work has shown that transformers can be trained to perform simple regression tasks in-context. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Hrayr Harutyunyan , Rafayel Darbinyan , Samvel Karapetyan , Hrant Khachatrian

Regression models often fail to generalize effectively in regions characterized by highly imbalanced label distributions. Previous methods for deep imbalanced regression rely on gradient-based weight updates, which tend to overfit in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Ismail Nejjar , Faez Ahmed , Olga Fink

Large language models are able to learn new tasks in context, where they are provided with instructions and a few annotated examples. However, the effectiveness of in-context learning is dependent on the provided context, and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Afra Amini , Massimiliano Ciaramita

In-context learning is governed by both temporal and semantic relationships, shaping how Large Language Models (LLMs) retrieve contextual information. Analogous to human episodic memory, where the retrieval of specific events is enabled by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Anooshka Bajaj , Deven Mahesh Mistry , Sahaj Singh Maini , Yash Aggarwal , Zoran Tiganj

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

Combining a pretrained language model (PLM) with textual patterns has been shown to help in both zero- and few-shot settings. For zero-shot performance, it makes sense to design patterns that closely resemble the text seen during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-09 Martin Schmitt , Hinrich Schütze

As model context lengths continue to increase, the number of demonstrations that can be provided in-context approaches the size of entire training datasets. We study the behavior of in-context learning (ICL) at this extreme scale on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Amanda Bertsch , Maor Ivgi , Emily Xiao , Uri Alon , Jonathan Berant , Matthew R. Gormley , Graham Neubig

When adapting an encoder to a new domain, the standard approach is to continue training with Masked Language Modeling (MLM). We show that temporarily switching to Causal Language Modeling (CLM) followed by a short MLM decay improves…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rian Touchent , Eric de la Clergerie

This study investigates the efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) in causal discovery. Using newly available open-source LLMs, OLMo and BLOOM, which provide access to their pre-training corpora, we investigate how LLMs address causal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Tao Feng , Lizhen Qu , Niket Tandon , Zhuang Li , Xiaoxi Kang , Gholamreza Haffari

In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 William L. Tong , Cengiz Pehlevan

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown great promise in planning and reasoning applications. These tasks demand robust systems, which arguably require a causal understanding of the environment. While LLMs can acquire and reflect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-29 John Gkountouras , Matthias Lindemann , Phillip Lippe , Efstratios Gavves , Ivan Titov

Understanding predictions made by deep neural networks is notoriously difficult, but also crucial to their dissemination. As all machine learning based methods, they are as good as their training data, and can also capture unwanted biases.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Amir Feder , Nadav Oved , Uri Shalit , Roi Reichart

Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-23 Ruiqi Zhang , Spencer Frei , Peter L. Bartlett