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Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a strong capacity for in-context learning: Given labeled examples, they can generate good predictions without parameter updates. However, many interactive settings go beyond static prediction to online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Emile Anand , Abdullah Ateyeh , Xinyuan Cao , Max Dabagia

At present, the mechanisms of in-context learning in Transformers are not well understood and remain mostly an intuition. In this paper, we suggest that training Transformers on auto-regressive objectives is closely related to…

Transformers are widely used in natural language processing, where they consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. This is mainly due to their attention-based architecture, which allows them to model rich linguistic relations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Nikolaos Mylonas , Ioannis Mollas , Grigorios Tsoumakas

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Kaijun Yuan , Tianyi Zhou

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Recent research has shown that Transformers with linear attention are capable of in-context learning (ICL) by implementing a linear estimator through gradient descent steps. However, the existing results on the optimization landscape apply…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yingcong Li , Ankit Singh Rawat , Samet Oymak

General-purpose pretrained sentence encoders such as BERT are not ideal for real-world conversational AI applications; they are computationally heavy, slow, and expensive to train. We propose ConveRT (Conversational Representations from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-30 Matthew Henderson , Iñigo Casanueva , Nikola Mrkšić , Pei-Hao Su , Tsung-Hsien Wen , Ivan Vulić

In-context learning \ -- performing tasks based on examples given in the prompt \ -- is an important capability that has emerged in large language models and has received significant attention in both theory and practice. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Ruomin Huang , Eshaan Nichani , Jason D. Lee , Rong Ge

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

Transformer-based models have made remarkable progress in image restoration (IR) tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer hinders its applicability to high-resolution images. Existing methods mitigate this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Yuang Ai , Huaibo Huang , Tao Wu , Qihang Fan , Ran He

Transformer neural networks can exhibit a surprising capacity for in-context learning (ICL) despite not being explicitly trained for it. Prior work has provided a deeper understanding of how ICL emerges in transformers, e.g. through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Aaditya K. Singh , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Ted Moskovitz , Erin Grant , Andrew M. Saxe , Felix Hill

Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Songtao Lu , Xiaodong Cui , Pin-Yu Chen

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

Despite their empirical success, the internal mechanism by which transformer models align tokens during language processing remains poorly understood. This paper provides a mechanistic and theoretical explanation of token alignment in LLMs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Hadi Daneshmand

We explore how to enhance next-token prediction models to perform in-context imitation learning on a real robot, where the robot executes new tasks by interpreting contextual information provided during the input phase, without updating its…

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for natural language processing. Part of their success is owed to a remarkable capability known as in-context learning (ICL): they can acquire and apply novel associations solely from their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Tiberiu Musat , Tiago Pimentel , Lorenzo Noci , Alessandro Stolfo , Mrinmaya Sachan , Thomas Hofmann

Regression models often fail to generalize effectively in regions characterized by highly imbalanced label distributions. Previous methods for deep imbalanced regression rely on gradient-based weight updates, which tend to overfit in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Ismail Nejjar , Faez Ahmed , Olga Fink

Attention is a key part of the transformer architecture. It is a sequence-to-sequence mapping that transforms each sequence element into a weighted sum of values. The weights are typically obtained as the softmax of dot products between…

Human listeners readily adjust to unfamiliar speakers and language varieties through exposure, but do these adaptation benefits extend to state-of-the-art spoken language models? We introduce a scalable framework that allows for in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Nathan Roll , Calbert Graham , Yuka Tatsumi , Kim Tien Nguyen , Meghan Sumner , Dan Jurafsky

Encoder transformer models compress information from all tokens in a sequence into a single [CLS] token to represent global context. This approach risks diluting fine-grained or hierarchical features, leading to information loss in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Asif Shahriar , Rifat Shahriyar , M Saifur Rahman