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Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Jie Ren , Qipeng Guo , Hang Yan , Dongrui Liu , Quanshi Zhang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin

Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Steve Yadlowsky , Lyric Doshi , Nilesh Tripuraneni

Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Nuri Mert Vural , Alberto Bietti , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Denny Wu

In-context learning (ICL) has proven to be a significant capability with the advancement of Large Language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks without…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Quanyu Long , Jianda Chen , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

There has been significant recent interest in understanding the capacity of Transformers for in-context learning (ICL), yet most theory focuses on supervised settings with explicitly labeled pairs. In practice, Transformers often perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jiashuo Fan , Paul Rosu , Aaron T. Wang , Zeyu Michael Li , Lawrence Carin , Xiang Cheng

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

With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Qingxiu Dong , Lei Li , Damai Dai , Ce Zheng , Jingyuan Ma , Rui Li , Heming Xia , Jingjing Xu , Zhiyong Wu , Tianyu Liu , Baobao Chang , Xu Sun , Lei Li , Zhifang Sui

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

We investigate whether chemical processes can perform in-context learning (ICL), a mode of computation typically associated with transformer architectures. ICL allows a system to infer task-specific rules from a sequence of examples without…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-01-13 Carlos Floyd , Hector Manuel Lopez Rios , Aaron R. Dinner , Suriyanarayanan Vaikuntanathan

In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Kartik Ahuja , David Lopez-Paz

Neural sequence models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) abilities, where they can perform new tasks when prompted with training and test examples, without any parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Yu Bai , Fan Chen , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Song Mei

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

In-context learning (ICL) improves language models' performance on a variety of NLP tasks by simply demonstrating a handful of examples at inference time. It is not well understood why ICL ability emerges, as the model has never been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Xiaochuang Han , Daniel Simig , Todor Mihaylov , Yulia Tsvetkov , Asli Celikyilmaz , Tianlu Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Qingyu Yin , Xuzheng He , Luoao Deng , Chak Tou Leong , Fan Wang , Yanzhao Yan , Xiaoyu Shen , Qiang Zhang

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Pranjal A. Chitale , Jay Gala , Raj Dabre

Large language models (LLM) have recently shown the extraordinary ability to perform unseen tasks based on few-shot examples provided as text, also known as in-context learning (ICL). While recent works have attempted to understand the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Harmon Bhasin , Timothy Ossowski , Yiqiao Zhong , Junjie Hu

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Liuwang Kang , Fan Wang , Shaoshan Liu , Hung-Chyun Chou , Chuan Lin , Ning Ding

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) are known for their exceptional performance in natural language processing, making them highly effective in many human life-related or even job-related tasks. The attention mechanism in the Transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Shuai Li , Zhao Song , Yu Xia , Tong Yu , Tianyi Zhou
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