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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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling few-shot learning without the need for gradient updates. Despite its advantages, the effectiveness of ICL heavily depends on the choice of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Vinay M. S. , Minh-Hao Van , Xintao Wu

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) as it empowers them to comprehend and reason across interconnected inputs. Evaluating the ICL ability of LLMs can enhance their utilization and deepen our…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Wentong Chen , Yankai Lin , ZhenHao Zhou , HongYun Huang , Yantao Jia , Zhao Cao , Ji-Rong Wen

Ever since the development of GPT-3 in the natural language processing (NLP) field, in-context learning (ICL) has played an essential role in utilizing large language models (LLMs). By presenting the LM utterance-label demonstrations at the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-18 Ming-Hao Hsu , Kai-Wei Chang , Shang-Wen Li , Hung-yi Lee

Several recent works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate iterations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Hadi Daneshmand , Suvrit Sra

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

In-context learning (ICL) is an important paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new tasks, but the generalization behavior of ICL remains poorly understood. We investigate the inductive biases of ICL from the perspective of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Chenglei Si , Dan Friedman , Nitish Joshi , Shi Feng , Danqi Chen , He He

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a key capability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), driven by their increasing scale and applicability. Despite its promise, effective ICL in the multimodal setting remains…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Yanshu Li

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

Transformer is a powerful architecture that achieves superior performance on various sequence learning tasks, including neural machine translation, language understanding, and sequence prediction. At the core of the Transformer is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Shaojie Bai , Makoto Yamada , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

In-context learning (ICL) facilitates Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibiting emergent ability on downstream tasks without updating billions of parameters. However, in the area of multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), two problems…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Jun Gao , Qian Qiao , Ziqiang Cao , Zili Wang , Wenjie Li

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable flexibility: they can adapt to novel tasks from in-context examples without any parameter updates, a capability known as in-context learning (ICL). Prior work on synthetic tasks has shown that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hua-Dong Xiong , Li Ji-An , Robert C. Wilson , Kwonjoon Lee , Xue-Xin Wei

Despite the architectural similarities between tabular in-context learning (ICL) models and large language models (LLMs), little is known about how individual layers contribute to tabular prediction. In this paper, we investigate how the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Amir Rezaei Balef , Mykhailo Koshil , Katharina Eggensperger

Sequence modelling requires determining which past tokens are causally relevant from the context and their importance: a process inherent to the attention layers in transformers, yet whose underlying learned mechanisms remain poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Francesco D'Angelo , Nicolas Flammarion

In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to solve novel tasks without weight updates. Despite its empirical success, the mechanism behind ICL remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to interpret, improve, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Chengye Li , Haiyun Liu , Yuanxi Li

In-context learning (ICL) improves language models' performance on a variety of NLP tasks by simply demonstrating a handful of examples at inference time. It is not well understood why ICL ability emerges, as the model has never been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Xiaochuang Han , Daniel Simig , Todor Mihaylov , Yulia Tsvetkov , Asli Celikyilmaz , Tianlu Wang

In-context learning (ICL), teaching a large language model (LLM) to perform a task with few-shot demonstrations rather than adjusting the model parameters, has emerged as a strong paradigm for using LLMs. While early studies primarily used…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Man Luo , Xin Xu , Zhuyun Dai , Panupong Pasupat , Mehran Kazemi , Chitta Baral , Vaiva Imbrasaite , Vincent Y Zhao

In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent task/function vector in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong , Taiji Suzuki

Transformer is a ubiquitous model for natural language processing and has attracted wide attentions in computer vision. The attention maps are indispensable for a transformer model to encode the dependencies among input tokens. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Jing Bai , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability for large language models (LLMs) to adapt to downstream tasks by leveraging a few (demonstration) examples. Despite its effectiveness, the mechanism behind ICL remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Pengfei He , Yingqian Cui , Han Xu , Hui Liu , Makoto Yamada , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing