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Related papers: In-Context Learning Creates Task Vectors

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In-context learning (ICL) has proven to be a significant capability with the advancement of Large Language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks without…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Quanyu Long , Jianda Chen , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities on textual data. We explore whether these capabilities can be extended to continuous vectors from diverse domains, obtained from black-box pretrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yufan Zhuang , Chandan Singh , Liyuan Liu , Jingbo Shang , Jianfeng Gao

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the most powerful and most unexpected capabilities to emerge in recent transformer-based large language models (LLMs). Yet the mechanisms that underlie it are poorly understood. In this paper, we…

Large language models (LLMs) like transformers demonstrate impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, allowing them to make predictions for new tasks based on prompt exemplars without parameter updates. While existing ICL theories…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Kevin Christian Wibisono , Yixin Wang

We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Josef Ott

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables transformer-based language models to adapt to new tasks by conditioning on demonstration examples. However, traditional example-driven in-context learning lacks explicit modules for knowledge retrieval and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Pan Chen , Shaohong Chen , Mark Wang , Shi Xuan Leong , Priscilla Fung , Varinia Bernales , Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Pre-trained large language models have demonstrated a strong ability to learn from context, known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite a surge of recent applications that leverage such capabilities, it is by no means clear, at least…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Bingqing Song , Jiaxiang Li , Rong Wang , Songtao Lu , Mingyi Hong

In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we study the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-03 Juno Kim , Tai Nakamaki , Taiji Suzuki

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations in the prompt. Two different mechanisms have been proposed to explain ICL: induction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kayo Yin , Jacob Steinhardt

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi

Large-scale Transformer language models (LMs) trained solely on next-token prediction with web-scale data can solve a wide range of tasks after seeing just a few examples. The mechanism behind this capability, known as in-context learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Jingcheng Niu , Subhabrata Dutta , Ahmed Elshabrawy , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of transformer-based language models, enabling them to perform tasks by conditioning on a small number of examples presented at inference time, without any parameter updates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Jathin Korrapati , Patrick Mendoza , Aditya Tomar , Abein Abraham

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, adapting to new tasks by simply conditioning on demonstrations without parameter updates. Compelling empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that ICL, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Taejong Joo , Diego Klabjan

Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform new tasks from in-context demonstrations, a phenomenon known as in-context learning (ICL). Recent work suggests that these demonstrations are compressed into task vectors (TVs), compact task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haolin Yang , Hakaze Cho , Kaize Ding , Naoya Inoue

We perform in-depth evaluations of in-context learning (ICL) on state-of-the-art transformer, state-space, and hybrid large language models over two categories of knowledge-based ICL tasks. Using a combination of behavioral probing and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Shenran Wang , Timothy Tin-Long Tse , Jian Zhu

In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Aaron Mueller , Albert Webson , Jackson Petty , Tal Linzen

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful models that can learn concepts at the inference stage via in-context learning (ICL). While theoretical studies, e.g., \cite{zhang2023trained}, attempt to explain the mechanism of ICL, they assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yue Xing , Xiaofeng Lin , Chenheng Xu , Namjoon Suh , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

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

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. However, the underlying working mechanism of ICL remains poorly understood. Recent research presents two conflicting views on ICL: One emphasizes the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Anhao Zhao , Fanghua Ye , Jinlan Fu , Xiaoyu Shen