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Related papers: Dual Operating Modes of In-Context Learning

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In-context learning (ICL) allows some autoregressive models to solve tasks via next-token prediction and without needing further training. This has led to claims about these model's ability to solve (learn) unseen tasks with only a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Adrian de Wynter

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. However, the underlying working mechanism of ICL remains poorly understood. Recent research presents two conflicting views on ICL: One emphasizes the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Anhao Zhao , Fanghua Ye , Jinlan Fu , Xiaoyu Shen

Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shang Liu , Zhongze Cai , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Tomoya Wakayama , Taiji Suzuki

This paper investigates the expected excess risk of in-context learning (ICL) for multiclass classification. We formalize each task as a sequence of labeled examples followed by a query input; a pretrained model then estimates the query's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-03 Chenrui Liu , Falong Tan , Chuanlong Xie , Yicheng Zeng , Lixing Zhu

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…

Transformer neural networks can exhibit a surprising capacity for in-context learning (ICL) despite not being explicitly trained for it. Prior work has provided a deeper understanding of how ICL emerges in transformers, e.g. through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Aaditya K. Singh , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Ted Moskovitz , Erin Grant , Andrew M. Saxe , Felix Hill

In-context learning (ICL) i.e. showing LLMs only a few task-specific demonstrations has led to downstream gains with no task-specific fine-tuning required. However, LLMs are sensitive to the choice of prompts, and therefore a crucial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Lingyu Gao , Aditi Chaudhary , Krishna Srinivasan , Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

In-Context Learning (ICL) has significantly expanded the general-purpose nature of large language models, allowing them to adapt to novel tasks using merely the inputted context. This has motivated a series of papers that analyze tractable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Core Francisco Park , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Itamar Pres , Hidenori Tanaka

This paper investigates context stickiness in in-context learning (ICL), a phenomenon where earlier examples in a prompt interfere with a transformer's ability to adapt to later tasks. Using synthetic regression tasks over linear and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Hanna Rød , Dagny Streit , Nils Valseth Selte , Justin Li

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

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to acquire new behaviors from the input sequence alone without any parameter updates. Recent studies have shown that ICL can surpass the original meaning learned in pretraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yongyi Yang , Hidenori Tanaka , Wei Hu

In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yingcong Li , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

Pre-trained large language models have demonstrated a strong ability to learn from context, known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite a surge of recent applications that leverage such capabilities, it is by no means clear, at least…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Bingqing Song , Jiaxiang Li , Rong Wang , Songtao Lu , Mingyi Hong

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understandably, a swath of research has been dedicated to uncovering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Jiaoda Li , Yifan Hou , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

As model context lengths continue to increase, the number of demonstrations that can be provided in-context approaches the size of entire training datasets. We study the behavior of in-context learning (ICL) at this extreme scale on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Amanda Bertsch , Maor Ivgi , Emily Xiao , Uri Alon , Jonathan Berant , Matthew R. Gormley , Graham Neubig

With the increasing ability of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has evolved as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where instead of fine-tuning the parameters of an LLM specific to a downstream task…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Andrew Parry , Debasis Ganguly , Manish Chandra

Transformer models exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL), adapting to novel tasks from examples within their context, yet the underlying mechanisms remain largely mysterious. Here, we provide an exact analytical characterization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Nischal Mainali , Lucas Teixeira

In-context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability alongside the development of scaled-up large language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Quanyu Long , Yin Wu , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Madhur Panwar , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal