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Pretrained Transformers demonstrate remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. However, theoretical studies often rely on simplified architectures…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Samet Demir , Zafer Dogan

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jiachen Jiang , Yuxin Dong , Jinxin Zhou , Zhihui Zhu

In-context learning based on attention models is examined for data with categorical outcomes, with inference in such models viewed from the perspective of functional gradient descent (GD). We develop a network composed of attention blocks,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-08 Aaron T. Wang , William Convertino , Xiang Cheng , Ricardo Henao , Lawrence Carin

We argue that in-context learning (ICL) predictably arises from standard self-supervised next-token pretraining, rather than being an exotic emergent property. This work establishes the foundational principles of this emergence by focusing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Paul M. Riechers , Henry R. Bigelow , Eric A. Alt , Adam Shai

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

Real-world applications of large language models (LLMs) in computational social science (CSS) tasks primarily depend on the effectiveness of instruction tuning (IT) or in-context learning (ICL). While IT has shown highly effective at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Taihang Wang , Xiaoman Xu , Yimin Wang , Ye Jiang

By allowing models to predict without task-specific training, in-context learning (ICL) with pretrained LLMs has enormous potential in NLP. However, a number of problems persist in ICL. In particular, its performance is sensitive to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Zhichao Xu , Daniel Cohen , Bei Wang , Vivek Srikumar

Numerous studies have investigated the underlying mechanisms of in-context learning (ICL) effectiveness to inspire the design of related methods. However, existing work predominantly assumes the effectiveness of the demonstrations provided…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Dingzirui Wang , Xuangliang Zhang , Keyan Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Yang Deng

In-context Learning (ICL) is the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform new tasks when conditioned on prompts comprising a few task examples. However, ICL performance can be critically sensitive to the choice of examples. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Shivanshu Gupta , Clemens Rosenbaum , Ethan R. Elenberg

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…

Demonstration ordering, which is an important strategy for in-context learning (ICL), can significantly affects the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, most of the current approaches of ordering require high computational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yinpeng Liu , Jiawei Liu , Xiang Shi , Qikai Cheng , Yong Huang , Wei Lu

Continual learning (CL) presents a fundamental challenge in training neural networks on sequential tasks without experiencing catastrophic forgetting. Traditionally, the dominant approach in CL has been gradient-based optimization, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Grzegorz Rypeść

In-context learning (ICL) empowers generative models to address new tasks effectively and efficiently on the fly, without relying on any artificially crafted optimization techniques. In this paper, we study extending ICL to address a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Fan Wang , Chuan Lin , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

In-Context Learning (ICL) combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved promising results on various NLP tasks. However, ICL requires high-quality annotated demonstrations which might not be available in real-world scenarios.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Dawei Li , Yaxuan Li , Dheeraj Mekala , Shuyao Li , Yulin wang , Xueqi Wang , William Hogan , Jingbo Shang

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

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

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to learn new tasks from examples in its input without any parameter updates. In contrast to previous theories of ICL relying on toy models and data settings, recently it has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Francesco Innocenti , El Mehdi Achour

In-context learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to perform diverse tasks in underrepresented languages using only short in-context information, offering a crucial avenue for narrowing the gap between high-resource and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Samuel Cahyawijaya , Holy Lovenia , Pascale Fung

In-Context Learning (ICL) is suffering from unsatisfactory performance and under-calibration due to high prior bias and unfaithful confidence. Some previous works fine-tuned language models for better ICL performance with enormous datasets…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Yufeng Zhao , Yoshihiro Sakai , Naoya Inoue

We investigate the transformer's capability to simulate the training process of deep models via in-context learning (ICL), i.e., in-context deep learning. Our key contribution is providing a positive example of using a transformer to train…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Weimin Wu , Maojiang Su , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Zhao Song , Han Liu