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We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

In-context learning (ICL) is a remarkable capability of pretrained transformers that allows models to generalize to unseen tasks after seeing only a few examples. We investigate empirically the conditions necessary on the pretraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Chase Goddard , Lindsay M. Smith , Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

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

Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yuxuan Li , James L. McClelland

Modern deep learning science often assumes that neural networks learn from a fixed data distribution. However, many practically important learning problems involve data distributions that change throughout training. How does such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Afiq Abdillah Effiezal Aswadi , Oliver Britton , Ross Baker , Matthew Farrugia-Roberts

Generalization and adaptation of learned skills to novel situations is a core requirement for intelligent autonomous robots. Although contextual reinforcement learning provides a principled framework for learning and generalization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-08 Pascal Klink , Hany Abdulsamad , Boris Belousov , Jan Peters

Transformers exhibit compositional reasoning on sequences not observed during training, a capability often attributed to in-context learning (ICL) and skill composition. We investigate this phenomenon using the Random Hierarchy Model (RHM),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jing Liu

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Guangyu Li , Meng Ding , Lijie Hu

Large Pre-trained Transformers exhibit an intriguing capacity for in-context learning. Without gradient updates, these models can rapidly construct new predictors from demonstrations presented in the inputs. Recent works promote this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Yi-Syuan Chen , Yun-Zhu Song , Cheng Yu Yeo , Bei Liu , Jianlong Fu , Hong-Han Shuai

Transformer architectures have facilitated the development of large-scale and general-purpose sequence models for prediction tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, e.g., GPT-3 and Swin Transformer. Although originally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Muning Wen , Runji Lin , Hanjing Wang , Yaodong Yang , Ying Wen , Luo Mai , Jun Wang , Haifeng Zhang , Weinan Zhang

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

Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wei Shi , Yuan Cao

Recent advances in hardware and big data acquisition have accelerated the development of deep learning techniques. For an extended period of time, increasing the model complexity has led to performance improvements for various tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Damian Owerko , Charilaos I. Kanatsoulis , Jennifer Bondarchuk , Donald J. Bucci , Alejandro Ribeiro

Transformers have impressive generalization capabilities on tasks with a fixed context length. However, they fail to generalize to sequences of arbitrary length, even for seemingly simple tasks such as duplicating a string. Moreover, simply…

Transformers exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where these models solve new tasks by using examples in the prompt without additional training. In our work, we identify and analyze two key components of ICL: (1) context-scaling, where model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Amirhesam Abedsoltan , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Jingfeng Wu , Mikhail Belkin

We show that a neural network originally designed for language processing can learn the dynamical rules of a stochastic system by observation of a single dynamical trajectory of the system, and can accurately predict its emergent behavior…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-02-18 Corneel Casert , Isaac Tamblyn , Stephen Whitelam

Large-scale models trained on broad data have recently become the mainstream architecture in computer vision due to their strong generalization performance. In this paper, the main focus is on an emergent ability in large vision models,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Yuanhan Zhang , Kaiyang Zhou , Ziwei Liu

While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable successes in several domains, its real-world application is limited due to many methods failing to generalise to unfamiliar conditions. In this work, we consider the problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Michael Beukman , Devon Jarvis , Richard Klein , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

In-context learning has been recognized as a key factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). It refers to the model's ability to learn patterns on the fly from provided in-context examples in the prompt during inference. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Bo Chen , Xiaoyu Li , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song