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Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, yet the quality of their predictions is fundamentally limited by the few costly labeled demonstrations that can fit into a prompt. Meanwhile, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Renpu Liu , Jing Yang

Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Chi Han , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhao , Heng Ji

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are foundational tools for modeling sequential data with latent Markovian structure, yet fitting them to real-world data remains computationally challenging. In this work, we show that pre-trained large language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Yijia Dai , Zhaolin Gao , Yahya Sattar , Sarah Dean , Jennifer J. Sun

The predictions of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks often improve significantly when including examples of the input--label relationship in the context. However, there is currently no consensus about how this in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Jannik Kossen , Yarin Gal , Tom Rainforth

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

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Chenyang Zhang , Yuan Cao

Transformer-based multimodal large language models often exhibit in-context learning (ICL) abilities. Motivated by this phenomenon, we ask: how do transformers learn to associate information across modalities from in-context examples? We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yiran Huang , Karsten Roth , Quentin Bouniot , Wenjia Xu , Zeynep Akata

In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn tasks from demonstration examples without parameter updates. Although it has been extensively studied in LLMs, its effectiveness in Vision-Language Models (VLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Gabriel O. dos Santos , Esther Colombini , Sandra Avila

In-context learning (ICL) emerges as a promising capability of large language models (LLMs) by providing them with demonstration examples to perform diverse tasks. However, the underlying mechanism of how LLMs learn from the provided…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Lean Wang , Lei Li , Damai Dai , Deli Chen , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Xu Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), which enables the model to perform new tasks conditioning only on the examples provided in the context without updating the model's weights. While ICL offers fast adaptation…

In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we study the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-03 Juno Kim , Tai Nakamaki , Taiji Suzuki

When large language models (LLMs) use in-context learning (ICL) to solve a new task, they must infer latent concepts from demonstration examples. This raises the question of whether and how transformers represent latent structures as part…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Guan Zhe Hong , Bhavya Vasudeva , Vatsal Sharan , Cyrus Rashtchian , Prabhakar Raghavan , Rina Panigrahy

The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Hongbo Li , Lingjie Duan , Yingbin Liang

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to learn new tasks from examples in its input without any parameter updates. In contrast to previous theories of ICL relying on toy models and data settings, recently it has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Francesco Innocenti , El Mehdi Achour

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Xingxuan Zhang , Haoran Wang , Jiansheng Li , Yuan Xue , Shikai Guan , Renzhe Xu , Hao Zou , Han Yu , Peng Cui

Understanding in-context learning (ICL) capability that enables large language models (LLMs) to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples is of utmost importance. This importance stems not only from the better utilization of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yuxiang Zhou , Jiazheng Li , Yanzheng Xiang , Hanqi Yan , Lin Gui , Yulan He

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Baturay Saglam , Xinyang Hu , Zhuoran Yang , Dionysis Kalogerias , Amin Karbasi

This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Josef Ott

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

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