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The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) is potentially attributed to two major abilities: task recognition (TR) for recognizing the task from demonstrations and utilizing pre-trained priors, and task learning (TL) for learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Xiaolei Wang , Xinyu Tang , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shang Liu , Zhongze Cai , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

In-Context Learning (ICL) is an important paradigm for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks through a few demonstrations. Despite the great success of ICL, the limitation of the demonstration number may lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Caoyun Fan , Jidong Tian , Yitian Li , Hao He , Yaohui Jin

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

In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as an important new paradigm in natural language processing and large language model (LLM) applications. However, the theoretical understanding of the ICL mechanism remains limited. This paper aims to…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Huaze Tang , Tianren Peng , Shao-lun Huang

In-context learning (ICL) is a recent advancement in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). This feature allows users to perform a new task without updating the model. Concretely, users can address tasks during the inference time…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Wai Man Si , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang

Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformer-based architectures, have been recently shown to have the capacity to carry out in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a decision on a new input is made via a direct mapping of the input…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Matteo Zecchin , Kai Yu , Osvaldo Simeone

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) abilities, enabling them to solve wide range of tasks via textual prompts alone. As these capabilities advance, the range of applicable domains continues to expand…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Yeongwoo Song , Jaeyong Bae , Dong-Kyum Kim , Hawoong Jeong

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

In-context learning (ICL) is a central capability of Transformer models, but the structures in data that enable its emergence and govern its robustness remain poorly understood. In this work, we study how the structure of pretraining tasks…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-01 Mary I. Letey , Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Yue M. Lu , Cengiz Pehlevan

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 large language models (LLMs) use in-context learning (ICL) to solve a new task, they must infer latent concepts from demonstration examples. This raises the question of whether and how transformers represent latent structures as part…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Guan Zhe Hong , Bhavya Vasudeva , Vatsal Sharan , Cyrus Rashtchian , Prabhakar Raghavan , Rina Panigrahy

Can in-context learning (ICL) override pre-trained label semantics, or does it merely refine an existing semantic backbone? We address this question by treating LLMs as prompt-induced classifiers and contrasting their behavior under…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Anantha Padmanaban Krishna Kumar

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

In-context learning (ICL)-the ability of transformer-based models to perform new tasks from examples provided at inference time-has emerged as a hallmark of modern language models. While recent works have investigated the mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-23 Soham Bonnerjee , Zhen Wei , Yeon , Anna Asch , Sagnik Nandy , Promit Ghosal

Generating rational and generally accurate responses to tasks, often accompanied by example demonstrations, highlights Large Language Model's (LLM's) remarkable In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities without requiring updates to the model's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Debanjan Dutta , Faizanuddin Ansari , Swagatam Das

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

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to perform few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples in the prompt. Despite its flexibility, ICL suffers from instability -- especially as prompt length increases with more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Josip Jukić , Jan Šnajder

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

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade