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Transformers excel at in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from demonstrations without parameter updates -- but how they do so remains a mystery. Recent work suggests that Transformers may internally run Gradient Descent (GD), a…
Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) is an important paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new tasks, but the generalization behavior of ICL remains poorly understood. We investigate the inductive biases of ICL from the perspective of…
Recent interest has surged in employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for machine translation (MT) via in-context learning (ICL) (Vilar et al., 2023). Most prior studies primarily focus on optimizing translation quality, with limited…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) adapts LLMs by providing demonstrations without fine-tuning the model parameters; however, it does not differentiate between demonstrations and quadratically increases the complexity of Transformer LLMs, exhausting…
In-context learning (ICL) enables transformers to adapt to new tasks through contextual examples without parameter updates. While existing research has typically studied ICL in fixed-complexity environments, practical language models…
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),…
In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…
Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…
In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a pivotal capability of auto-regressive large language models, yet it is hindered by a notable sensitivity to the ordering of context examples regardless of their mutual independence. To address this…
We perform in-depth evaluations of in-context learning (ICL) on state-of-the-art transformer, state-space, and hybrid large language models over two categories of knowledge-based ICL tasks. Using a combination of behavioral probing and…
In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful ability that emerges in transformer models, enabling them to learn from context without weight updates. Recent work has established emergent ICL as a transient phenomenon that can sometimes disappear…
While in-context learning (ICL) has achieved remarkable success in natural language and vision domains, its theoretical understanding-particularly in the context of structured geometric data-remains unexplored. This paper initiates a…
Transformers have become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling tasks such as natural language processing or audio processing, and they are now even considered for tasks that are not naturally sequential such as image…
Fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) are two prevalent methods in imbuing large language models with task-specific knowledge. It is commonly believed that fine-tuning can surpass ICL given sufficient training samples as it allows the…
The emergence of In-Context Learning (ICL) in LLMs remains a remarkable phenomenon that is partially understood. To explain ICL, recent studies have created theoretical connections to Gradient Descent (GD). We ask, do such connections hold…
Transformers have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, raising the question of whether they can serve as metalearners that adapt to new tasks using only a small number of in-context examples, without any further…
In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a successful paradigm for leveraging large language models (LLMs). However, it often struggles to generalize beyond the distribution of the provided demonstrations. A recent advancement in enhancing…