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In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks by prompting them with a sequence of training examples. However, it is known that ICL is very sensitive to the choice of training examples: randomly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Ting-Yun Chang , Robin Jia

In-context learning (ICL) is the trending prompting strategy in the era of large language models (LLMs), where a few examples are demonstrated to evoke LLMs' power for a given task. How to select informative examples remains an open issue.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Chenming Tang , Zhixiang Wang , Yunfang Wu

Attention-based transformers have been remarkably successful at modeling generative processes across various domains and modalities. In this paper, we study the behavior of transformers on data drawn from \kth Markov processes, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Nived Rajaraman , Marco Bondaschi , Kannan Ramchandran , Michael Gastpar , Ashok Vardhan Makkuva

This paper investigates the relationship between large language models' (LLMs) ability to recognize repetitive input patterns and their performance on in-context learning (ICL). In contrast to prior work that has primarily focused on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Nhi Hoai Doan , Tatsuya Hiraoka , Kentaro Inui

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has accelerated the emergence of in-context learning (ICL) as a cutting-edge approach in the natural language processing domain. Recently, ICL has been employed in visual understanding…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Dianmo Sheng , Dongdong Chen , Zhentao Tan , Qiankun Liu , Qi Chu , Jianmin Bao , Tao Gong , Bin Liu , Shengwei Xu , Nenghai Yu

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables pretrained LLMs to adapt to downstream tasks by conditioning on a small set of input-output demonstrations, without any parameter updates. Although there have been many theoretical efforts to explain how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Xuhan Tong , Yuchen Zeng , Jiawei Zhang

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

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong in-context learning capabilities, but how they track and retrieve information from context remains underexplored. Drawing on the free recall paradigm in cognitive science (where participants…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Anooshka Bajaj , Deven Mahesh Mistry , Sahaj Singh Maini , Yash Aggarwal , Billy Dickson , Zoran Tiganj

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a key mechanism for harnessing the capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, its effectiveness remains highly sensitive to the quality of input ICL sequences,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yanshu Li , Jianjiang Yang , Tian Yun , Pinyuan Feng , Jinfa Huang , Ruixiang Tang

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. Despite extensive empirical studies, a principled understanding of ICL emergence at scale remains more elusive. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sushant Mehta , Ishan Gupta

In-Context Learning (ICL) has been a powerful emergent property of large language models that has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In contrast to regular gradient-based learning, ICL is highly interpretable and does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Brian K Chen , Tianyang Hu , Hui Jin , Hwee Kuan Lee , Kenji Kawaguchi

In-context learning (ICL) has proven highly effective across diverse large language model (LLM) tasks. However, its potential for enhancing tasks that demand step-by-step logical deduction, such as mathematical reasoning, remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Ang Gao , Changshuo Zhang , Xiao Zhang , Deyang Li , Minjun Zhao , Fangchao Liu , Xinyu Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhaiming Shen , Alexander Hsu , Rongjie Lai , Wenjing Liao

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie

In-Context Learning (ICL) is an intriguing ability of large language models (LLMs). Despite a substantial amount of work on its behavioral aspects and how it emerges in miniature setups, it remains unclear which mechanism assembles task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Aleksandra Bakalova , Yana Veitsman , Xinting Huang , Michael Hahn

Accurate uncertainty quantification is crucial for the safe deployment of machine learning models, and prior research has demonstrated improvements in the calibration of modern language models (LMs). We study in-context learning (ICL), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hanlin Zhang , Yi-Fan Zhang , Yaodong Yu , Dhruv Madeka , Dean Foster , Eric Xing , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Sham Kakade

Recent works have suggested that In-Context Learning (ICL) operates in dual modes, i.e. task retrieval (remember learned patterns from pre-training) and task learning (inference-time ''learning'' from demonstrations). However, disentangling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Zhouxiang Fang , Aayush Mishra , Muhan Gao , Anqi Liu , Daniel Khashabi

In-Context Learning (ICL) enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) with demonstrations. However, obtaining these demonstrations primarily relies on manual effort. In most real-world scenarios, users are often unwilling or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Jinglong Gao , Xiao Ding , Lingxiao Zou , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to condition on a few in-context demonstrations (input-output examples of the underlying task) to generate the answer for a new query input, without updating parameters. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Yongqiang Chen , Binghui Xie , Kaiwen Zhou , Bo Han , Yatao Bian , James Cheng

We propose to improve in-context learning (ICL) by optimizing the continuous embeddings of a fixed few-shot prompt at test time. The key observation is that the log-probabilities a model assigns to its demonstrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Baturay Saglam , Dionysis Kalogerias