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Large-scale language models have shown the ability to adapt to a new task via conditioning on a few demonstrations (i.e., in-context learning). However, in the vision-language domain, most large-scale pre-trained vision-language (VL) models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Masoud Monajatipoor , Liunian Harold Li , Mozhdeh Rouhsedaghat , Lin F. Yang , Kai-Wei Chang

In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-24 Kaito Takanami , Takashi Takahashi , Yoshiyuki Kabashima

In-context learning (ICL) has shown impressive results in few-shot learning tasks, yet its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. A recent line of work suggests that ICL performs gradient descent (GD)-based optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Gilad Deutch , Nadav Magar , Tomer Bar Natan , Guy Dar

Recent works have suggested that In-Context Learning (ICL) operates in dual modes, i.e. task retrieval (remember learned patterns from pre-training) and task learning (inference-time ''learning'' from demonstrations). However, disentangling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Zhouxiang Fang , Aayush Mishra , Muhan Gao , Anqi Liu , Daniel Khashabi

In-Context Learning (ICL) has been extensively studied in text-only Language Models, but remains largely unexplored in the speech domain. Here, we investigate how linguistic and acoustic features affect ICL in Speech Language Models. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Charlotte Pouw , Hosein Mohebbi , Afra Alishahi , Willem Zuidema

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to condition on a few in-context demonstrations (input-output examples of the underlying task) to generate the answer for a new query input, without updating parameters. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Yongqiang Chen , Binghui Xie , Kaiwen Zhou , Bo Han , Yatao Bian , James Cheng

Transformer-based large language models exhibit in-context learning, enabling adaptation to downstream tasks via few-shot prompting with demonstrations. In practice, such models are often fine-tuned to improve zero-shot performance on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Chungpa Lee , Jy-yong Sohn , Kangwook Lee

In-context learning (ICL) empowers generative models to address new tasks effectively and efficiently on the fly, without relying on any artificially crafted optimization techniques. In this paper, we study extending ICL to address a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Fan Wang , Chuan Lin , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

Despite the surprising few-shot performance of in-context learning (ICL), it is still a common practice to randomly sample examples to serve as context. This paper advocates a new principle for ICL: self-adaptive in-context learning. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Zhiyong Wu , Yaoxiang Wang , Jiacheng Ye , Lingpeng Kong

While in-context learning is commonly associated with causal language models, such as GPT, we demonstrate that this capability also 'emerges' in masked language models. Through an embarrassingly simple inference technique, we enable an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 David Samuel

Implicit in-context learning (ICL) has newly emerged as a promising paradigm that simulates ICL behaviors in the representation space of Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to attain few-shot performance at zero-shot cost. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jiaqian Li , Yanshu Li , Ligong Han , Ruixiang Tang , Wenya Wang

"Induction heads" are attention heads that implement a simple algorithm to complete token sequences like [A][B] ... [A] -> [B]. In this work, we present preliminary and indirect evidence for a hypothesis that induction heads might…

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Sewon Min , Xinxi Lyu , Ari Holtzman , Mikel Artetxe , Mike Lewis , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Luke Zettlemoyer

In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a pivotal capability of auto-regressive large language models, yet it is hindered by a notable sensitivity to the ordering of context examples regardless of their mutual independence. To address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Lizhe Fang , Yifei Wang , Khashayar Gatmiry , Lei Fang , Yisen Wang

Transformer models exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL), adapting to novel tasks from examples within their context, yet the underlying mechanisms remain largely mysterious. Here, we provide an exact analytical characterization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Nischal Mainali , Lucas Teixeira

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful paradigm emerged from large language models (LLMs). Despite its promises, ICL performance is known to be highly sensitive to input examples. In this work, we use $\textit{in-context influences}$ to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Tai Nguyen , Eric Wong

Accurate uncertainty quantification is crucial for the safe deployment of machine learning models, and prior research has demonstrated improvements in the calibration of modern language models (LMs). We study in-context learning (ICL), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hanlin Zhang , Yi-Fan Zhang , Yaodong Yu , Dhruv Madeka , Dean Foster , Eric Xing , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Sham Kakade

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

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful ability that emerges in transformer models, enabling them to learn from context without weight updates. Recent work has established emergent ICL as a transient phenomenon that can sometimes disappear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Aaditya K. Singh , Ted Moskovitz , Sara Dragutinovic , Felix Hill , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Andrew M. Saxe

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have demonstrated remarkable abilities across diverse tasks, especially as they are scaled up. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art models struggle in certain cases,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Irina Bigoulaeva , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych