English
Related papers

Related papers: Can Transformers Learn Sequential Function Classes…

200 papers

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

In-context learning (ICL) is an emerging capability of large autoregressive language models where a few input-label demonstrations are appended to the input to enhance the model's understanding of downstream NLP tasks, without directly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Zhuocheng Gong , Jiahao Liu , Qifan Wang , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

In-context learning (ICL) is a valuable capability exhibited by Transformers pretrained on diverse sequence tasks. However, previous studies have observed that ICL often conflicts with the model's inherent in-weight learning (IWL) ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Guanyu Chen , Ruichen Wang , Tianren Zhang , Feng Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL), where learning a new task from just a few training examples is done without being explicitly pre-trained. However, despite the success of LLMs, there…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Xindi Wang , Yufei Wang , Can Xu , Xiubo Geng , Bowen Zhang , Chongyang Tao , Frank Rudzicz , Robert E. Mercer , Daxin Jiang

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

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

Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning (IWL), where memorized information is encoded in model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Suraj Anand , Michael A. Lepori , Jack Merullo , Ellie Pavlick

Large-scale Transformer language models (LMs) trained solely on next-token prediction with web-scale data can solve a wide range of tasks after seeing just a few examples. The mechanism behind this capability, known as in-context learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Jingcheng Niu , Subhabrata Dutta , Ahmed Elshabrawy , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Damai Dai , Yutao Sun , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Shuming Ma , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shang Liu , Zhongze Cai , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

Transformers have become a standard architecture in machine learning, demonstrating strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities that allow them to learn from the prompt at inference time. However, uncertainty quantification for ICL remains…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-23 Zhe Huang , Simone Rossi , Rui Yuan , Thomas Hannagan

Autoregressive transformers exhibit adaptive learning through in-context learning (ICL), which begs the question of how. Prior works have shown that transformers represent the ICL tasks as vectors in their representations. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Seungwook Han , Jinyeop Song , Jeff Gore , Pulkit Agrawal

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) 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

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

In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to learn from a few examples provided in the prompt, enabling downstream generalization without the requirement for gradient updates. Despite encouragingly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Haitao Mao , Guangliang Liu , Yao Ma , Rongrong Wang , Kristen Johnson , Jiliang Tang

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

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables transformer-based language models to adapt to new tasks by conditioning on demonstration examples. However, traditional example-driven in-context learning lacks explicit modules for knowledge retrieval and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Pan Chen , Shaohong Chen , Mark Wang , Shi Xuan Leong , Priscilla Fung , Varinia Bernales , Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong

In-context learning (ICL) -- the capacity of a model to infer and apply abstract patterns from examples provided within its input -- has been extensively studied in large language models trained for next-token prediction on human text. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Nathan Breslow , Aayush Mishra , Mahler Revsine , Michael C. Schatz , Anqi Liu , Daniel Khashabi
‹ Prev 1 3 4 5 6 7 10 Next ›