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Whereas the recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has exhibited impressive general performance, it still has a large gap with fully-supervised models on specific tasks such as multi-span question answering. Previous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Zixian Huang , Jiaying Zhou , Gengyang Xiao , Gong Cheng

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) is a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where a large language model (LLM) observes a small number of demonstrations and a test instance as its input, and directly makes predictions without…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Fei Zhao , Taotian Pang , Zhen Wu , Zheng Ma , Shujian Huang , Xinyu Dai

Can in-context learning (ICL) override pre-trained label semantics, or does it merely refine an existing semantic backbone? We address this question by treating LLMs as prompt-induced classifiers and contrasting their behavior under…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Anantha Padmanaban Krishna Kumar

Transformers have demonstrated a strong ability for in-context learning (ICL), enabling models to solve previously unseen tasks using only example input output pairs provided at inference time. While prior theoretical work has established…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rushil Chandrupatla , Leo Bangayan , Sebastian Leng

In-context learning (ICL) is a recent advancement in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). This feature allows users to perform a new task without updating the model. Concretely, users can address tasks during the inference time…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Wai Man Si , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang

In-context learning, where pre-trained language models learn to perform tasks from task examples and instructions in their contexts, has attracted much attention in the NLP community. However, the ability of in-context learning is not fully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Minlie Huang

Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from a few examples provided in context at inference, without any weight updates. Newly expanded context windows allow us to investigate ICL with hundreds…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in handling long sequences. Some models like Gemini could even to be capable of dealing with millions of tokens. However, their performance evaluation has largely been confined to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Tianle Li , Ge Zhang , Quy Duc Do , Xiang Yue , Wenhu Chen

In-context learning (ICL) is an important capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling these models to dynamically adapt based on specific, in-context exemplars, thereby improving accuracy and relevance. However, LLM's responses may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Tong Wu , Ashwinee Panda , Jiachen T. Wang , Prateek Mittal

Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of using in-context learning (ICL) to steer large language models (LLMs) in processing tabular data, a challenging task given the structured nature of such data. Despite advancements in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Jingyu Hu , Weiru Liu , Mengnan Du

Despite the surprising few-shot performance of in-context learning (ICL), it is still a common practice to randomly sample examples to serve as context. This paper advocates a new principle for ICL: self-adaptive in-context learning. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Zhiyong Wu , Yaoxiang Wang , Jiacheng Ye , Lingpeng Kong

We investigate the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on sentence classification tasks with semantically-unrelated labels ("foo"/"bar"). We find intervening in only 1\% heads (named "in-context heads") significantly affects ICL accuracy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Zeping Yu , Sophia Ananiadou

Interpreting the internal process of neural models has long been a challenge. This challenge remains relevant in the era of large language models (LLMs) and in-context learning (ICL); for example, ICL poses a new issue of interpreting which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Mengyu Ye , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Goro Kobayashi , Jun Suzuki

Shortcut learning refers to the phenomenon where models employ simple, non-robust decision rules in practical tasks, which hinders their generalization and robustness. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) in recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Rui Song , Yingji Li , Lida Shi , Fausto Giunchiglia , Hao Xu

The emergence of long-context large language models (LLMs) has enabled the use of hundreds, or even thousands, of demonstrations for in-context learning (ICL) - a previously impractical regime. This paper investigates whether traditional…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Arjun R. Akula , Kazuma Hashimoto , Krishna Srinivasan , Aditi Chaudhary , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

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

Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Damai Dai , Yutao Sun , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Shuming Ma , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks with only a small set of examples at inference time, thereby avoiding task-specific fine-tuning. However, in-context examples may contain privacy-sensitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Rob Romijnders , Mohammad Mahdi Derakhshani , Jonathan Petit , Max Welling , Christos Louizos , Yuki M. Asano

The remarkable ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand and follow instructions has sometimes been limited by their in-context learning (ICL) performance in low-resource languages. To address this, we introduce a novel approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Xiaoqian Li , Ercong Nie , Sheng Liang