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Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) based on Transformer have demonstrated striking in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without any parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Xinhao Yao , Xiaolin Hu , Shenzhi Yang , Yong Liu

Many neural network architectures are known to be Turing Complete, and can thus, in principle implement arbitrary algorithms. However, Transformers are unique in that they can implement gradient-based learning algorithms under simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Xiang Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Suvrit Sra

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

In-context learning (ICL) has become a prominent paradigm to rapidly customize LLMs to new tasks without fine-tuning. However, despite the empirical evidence of its usefulness, we still do not truly understand how ICL works. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Harshita Narnoli , Mihai Surdeanu

Transformer architectures can solve unseen tasks based on input-output pairs in a given prompt due to in-context learning (ICL). Existing theoretical studies on ICL have mainly focused on linear regression tasks, often with i.i.d. inputs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Yanna Ding , Songtao Lu , Yingdong Lu , Tomasz Nowicki , Jianxi Gao

In-context learning (ICL) has revolutionized the capabilities of transformer models in NLP. In our project, we extend the understanding of the mechanisms underpinning ICL by exploring whether transformers can learn from sequential,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Ryan Campbell , Emma Guo , Evan Hu , Reya Vir , Ethan Hsiao

We propose a new technique that boosts the convergence of training generative adversarial networks. Generally, the rate of training deep models reduces severely after multiple iterations. A key reason for this phenomenon is that a deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-15 Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki

Newton's method may exhibit slower convergence than vanilla Gradient Descent in its initial phase on strongly convex problems. Classical Newton-type multilevel methods mitigate this but, like Gradient Descent, achieve only linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-25 Nick Tsipinakis , Panos Parpas , Matthias Voigt

Newton's method may exhibit slower convergence than vanilla Gradient Descent in its initial phase on strongly convex problems. Classical Newton-type multilevel methods mitigate this but, like Gradient Descent, achieve only linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-05 Nick Tsipinakis , Panagiotis Tigkas , Panos Parpas

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Madhur Panwar , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

Transformer-based multimodal large language models often exhibit in-context learning (ICL) abilities. Motivated by this phenomenon, we ask: how do transformers learn to associate information across modalities from in-context examples? We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yiran Huang , Karsten Roth , Quentin Bouniot , Wenjia Xu , Zeynep Akata

Second-order optimizers hold intriguing potential for deep learning, but suffer from increased cost and sensitivity to the non-convexity of the loss surface as compared to gradient-based approaches. We introduce a coordinate descent method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Ravi G. Patel , Nathaniel A. Trask , Mamikon A. Gulian , Eric C. Cyr

In-context learning (ICL) allows transformer-based language models that are pre-trained on general text to quickly learn a specific task with a few "task demonstrations" without updating their parameters, significantly boosting their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Zijian Zhou , Xiaoqiang Lin , Xinyi Xu , Alok Prakash , Daniela Rus , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

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

The intriguing in-context learning (ICL) abilities of deep Transformer models have lately garnered significant attention. By studying in-context linear regression on unimodal Gaussian data, recent empirical and theoretical works have argued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

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

Some autoregressive models exhibit in-context learning capabilities: being able to learn as an input sequence is processed, without undergoing any parameter changes, and without being explicitly trained to do so. The origins of this…

Recent works have empirically analyzed in-context learning and shown that transformers trained on synthetic linear regression tasks can learn to implement ridge regression, which is the Bayes-optimal predictor, given sufficient capacity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Arvind Mahankali , Tatsunori B. Hashimoto , Tengyu Ma

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance in natural language processing, making them highly effective in many human life-related or even job-related tasks. The attention mechanism in the Transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Shuai Li , Zhao Song , Yu Xia , Tong Yu , Tianyi Zhou

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) refers to the ability of RL agents to adapt to new tasks at inference time without parameter updates by conditioning on additional context. Recent empirical studies further demonstrate that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang