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Related papers: In-context Learning and Gradient Descent Revisited

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Large Language Models (LLM) hold immense promise for real-world applications, but their generic knowledge often falls short of domain-specific needs. Fine-tuning, a common approach, can suffer from catastrophic forgetting and hinder…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Emile Contal , Garrin McGoldrick

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…

Low-rank matrix estimation is a canonical problem that finds numerous applications in signal processing, machine learning and imaging science. A popular approach in practice is to factorize the matrix into two compact low-rank factors, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Tian Tong , Cong Ma , Yuejie Chi

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) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance the code generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), which incorporates code examples inside the prompt to let LLMs learn from demonstrations. However,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Dongze Li , Songqiang Chen , Jialun Cao , Shing-Chi Cheung

Gradient descent can be surprisingly good at optimizing deep neural networks without overfitting and without explicit regularization. We find that the discrete steps of gradient descent implicitly regularize models by penalizing gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 David G. T. Barrett , Benoit Dherin

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

The gradient descent (GD) method -- is a fundamental and likely the most popular optimization algorithm in machine learning (ML), with a history traced back to a paper in 1847 (Cauchy, 1847). It was studied under various assumptions,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-20 Aleksandr Lobanov , Alexander Gasnikov , Eduard Gorbunov , Martin Takáč

In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 William L. Tong , Cengiz Pehlevan

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 pretrained language models (LMs) have shown impressive In-Context Learning (ICL) ability, where the model learns to do an unseen task via a prompt consisting of input-output examples as the demonstration, without any parameter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Jiacheng Ye , Zhiyong Wu , Jiangtao Feng , Tao Yu , Lingpeng Kong

Language models, especially pre-trained large language models, have showcased remarkable abilities as few-shot in-context learners (ICL), adept at adapting to new tasks with just a few demonstrations in the input context. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Man Luo , Xin Xu , Yue Liu , Panupong Pasupat , Mehran Kazemi

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown their effectiveness in multiple complicated natural language reasoning tasks. A key challenge remains in adapting these models efficiently to new or unfamiliar tasks. In-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Siqi Liang , Sumyeong Ahn , Jiayu Zhou

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the process of adding a small number of localized examples from a training set of labelled data to an LLM's prompt with an objective to effectively control the generative process seeking to improve the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Manish Chandra , Debasis Ganguly , Iadh Ounis

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great performance in few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL) for a variety of generative and discriminative chemical design tasks. The newly expanded context windows of LLMs can further improve ICL…

Transformers have demonstrated a strong ability for in-context learning (ICL), enabling models to solve previously unseen tasks using only example input output pairs provided at inference time. While prior theoretical work has established…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rushil Chandrupatla , Leo Bangayan , Sebastian Leng

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a technique by which language models make predictions based on examples provided in their input context. Previously, their context window size imposed a limit on the number of examples that can be shown, making…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jinheon Baek , Sun Jae Lee , Prakhar Gupta , Geunseob Oh , Siddharth Dalmia , Prateek Kolhar

In deep learning, it is common to use more network parameters than training points. In such scenarioof over-parameterization, there are usually multiple networks that achieve zero training error so that thetraining algorithm induces an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Hung-Hsu Chou , Carsten Gieshoff , Johannes Maly , Holger Rauhut

Transformers have a remarkable ability to learn and execute tasks based on examples provided within the input itself, without explicit prior training. It has been argued that this capability, known as in-context learning (ICL), is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-06 Yue M. Lu , Mary I. Letey , Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Anindita Maiti , Cengiz Pehlevan

In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Roee Hendel , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson