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Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in pervasive computing due to their versatility and strong performance. However, despite their ubiquitous use, the exact mechanisms underlying their outstanding performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Alhassan Abdelhalim , Janick Edinger , Sören Laue , Michaela Regneri

Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for AI, with the key ability of in-context learning (ICL), where they can perform well on unseen tasks based on a brief series of task examples without necessitating any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Zhenmei Shi , Junyi Wei , Zhuoyan Xu , Yingyu Liang

We observe a novel phenomenon, contextual entrainment, across a wide range of language models (LMs) and prompt settings, providing a new mechanistic perspective on how LMs become distracted by ``irrelevant'' contextual information in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Jingcheng Niu , Xingdi Yuan , Tong Wang , Hamidreza Saghir , Amir H. Abdi

Transformer models exhibit in-context learning: the ability to accurately predict the response to a novel query based on illustrative examples in the input sequence. In-context learning contrasts with traditional in-weights learning of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Gautam Reddy

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

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

Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) seeks to explain how neural networks implement their capabilities, but the scale of Large Language Models (LLMs) has limited prior MI work in Machine Translation (MT) to word-level analyses. We study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Théo Lasnier , Armel Zebaze , Djamé Seddah , Rachel Bawden , Benoît Sagot

The state of the art in learning meaningful semantic representations of words is the Transformer model and its attention mechanisms. Simply put, the attention mechanisms learn to attend to specific parts of the input dispensing recurrence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Dongsheng Wang , Casper Hansen , Lucas Chaves Lima , Christian Hansen , Maria Maistro , Jakob Grue Simonsen , Christina Lioma

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for natural language processing. Part of their success is owed to a remarkable capability known as in-context learning (ICL): they can acquire and apply novel associations solely from their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Tiberiu Musat , Tiago Pimentel , Lorenzo Noci , Alessandro Stolfo , Mrinmaya Sachan , Thomas Hofmann

In-context learning is governed by both temporal and semantic relationships, shaping how Large Language Models (LLMs) retrieve contextual information. Analogous to human episodic memory, where the retrieval of specific events is enabled by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Anooshka Bajaj , Deven Mahesh Mistry , Sahaj Singh Maini , Yash Aggarwal , Zoran Tiganj

Large Language Model (LLM) based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling large speech datasets and generating natural speech for new speakers. However, LLM-based TTS models are not robust as the…

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Michael Hahn , Navin Goyal

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly strong contenders in machine translation. In this work, we focus on document-level translation, where some words cannot be translated without context from outside the sentence. Specifically, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Wafaa Mohammed , Vlad Niculae

Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Ekin Akyürek , Bailin Wang , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

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

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance improvement through in-context learning (ICL) by leveraging task-specific examples in the input. However, the mechanisms behind this improvement remain elusive. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Safoora Yousefi , Leo Betthauser , Hosein Hasanbeig , Raphaël Millière , Ida Momennejad

The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yang Li , Zhichen Dong , Yuhan Sun , Weixun Wang , Shaopan Xiong , Yijia Luo , Jiashun Liu , Han Lu , Jiamang Wang , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng , Junchi Yan

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) answer visual questions by transferring information from images to text through a series of attention heads. While this image-to-text information flow is central to visual question answering, its…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Jinyeong Kim , Seil Kang , Jiwoo Park , Junhyeok Kim , Seong Jae Hwang

The ability to process long contexts is crucial for many natural language processing tasks, yet it remains a significant challenge. While substantial progress has been made in enhancing the efficiency of attention mechanisms, there is still…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Konstantin Donhauser , Charles Arnal , Mohammad Pezeshki , Vivien Cabannes , David Lopez-Paz , Kartik Ahuja

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi