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We study the in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of pretrained Transformers in the setting of nonlinear regression. Specifically, we focus on a random Transformer with a nonlinear MLP head where the first layer is randomly initialized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-19 Samet Demir , Zafer Dogan

Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities, but the mechanisms underlying relational reasoning remain poorly understood. We investigate how transformers perform \textit{transitive inference}, a classic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jesse Geerts , Andrew Liu , Stephanie Chan , Claudia Clopath , Kimberly Stachenfeld

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the impressive ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) from only a few examples, but the success of ICL varies widely from task to task. Thus, it is important to quickly determine whether ICL is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Harvey Yiyun Fu , Qinyuan Ye , Albert Xu , Xiang Ren , Robin Jia

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of In-Context Learning (ICL) by addressing several open questions: (a) What type of ICL estimator is learned by large language models? (b) What is a proper performance metric for ICL and what…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-11 Yufeng Zhang , Fengzhuo Zhang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

In-context learning (ICL) is an important capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling these models to dynamically adapt based on specific, in-context exemplars, thereby improving accuracy and relevance. However, LLM's responses may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Tong Wu , Ashwinee Panda , Jiachen T. Wang , Prateek Mittal

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

In-Context Learning (ICL) is an emergent capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Only a few demonstrations enable LLMs to be used as blackbox for new tasks. Previous studies have shown that using LLMs' outputs as labels is effective in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remains poorly understood despite its consistent effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples. To clarify and improve these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Waïss Azizian , Ali Hasan

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to unseen tasks with in-context training samples without fine-tuning remains an important research problem. To learn a robust LLM that adapts well to unseen tasks, multiple meta-training approaches have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Sanchit Sinha , Yuguang Yue , Victor Soto , Mayank Kulkarni , Jianhua Lu , Aidong Zhang

In-context learning (ICL) facilitates Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibiting emergent ability on downstream tasks without updating billions of parameters. However, in the area of multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), two problems…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Jun Gao , Qian Qiao , Ziqiang Cao , Zili Wang , Wenjie Li

Factual knowledge extraction aims to explicitly extract knowledge parameterized in pre-trained language models for application in downstream tasks. While prior work has been investigating the impact of supervised fine-tuning data on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Xuan Gong , Hanbo Huang , Shiyu Liang

Implicit in-context learning (ICL) has newly emerged as a promising paradigm that simulates ICL behaviors in the representation space of Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to attain few-shot performance at zero-shot cost. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jiaqian Li , Yanshu Li , Ligong Han , Ruixiang Tang , Wenya Wang

Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from a few examples provided in context at inference, without any weight updates. Newly expanded context windows allow us to investigate ICL with hundreds…

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) employ multi-modal in-context learning (MM-ICL) to adapt to new tasks by leveraging demonstration examples. While increasing the number of demonstrations boosts performance, they incur significant…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Shin'ya Yamaguchi , Daiki Chijiwa , Tamao Sakao , Taku Hasegawa

Transformer models exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL), adapting to novel tasks from examples within their context, yet the underlying mechanisms remain largely mysterious. Here, we provide an exact analytical characterization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Nischal Mainali , Lucas Teixeira

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), which can also be referred to as supervised fine-tuning (SFT)\footnote{In this paper, unless specified otherwise, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Shengyu Zhang , Linfeng Dong , Xiaoya Li , Sen Zhang , Xiaofei Sun , Shuhe Wang , Jiwei Li , Runyi Hu , Tianwei Zhang , Fei Wu , Guoyin Wang

We investigate the mechanistic underpinnings of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models by reconciling two dominant perspectives: the component-level analysis of attention heads and the holistic decomposition of ICL into Task…

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

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) enables large language models to perform few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples in the prompt. Despite its flexibility, ICL suffers from instability -- especially as prompt length increases with more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Josip Jukić , Jan Šnajder

In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Faris Chaudhry , Siddhant Gadkari