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In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for easily adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to various tasks. However, our understanding of how ICL works remains limited. We explore a simple model of ICL in a controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Omar Naim , Guilhem Fouilhé , Nicholas Asher

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

In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-24 Kaito Takanami , Takashi Takahashi , Yoshiyuki Kabashima

Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions. We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Daniel Wurgaft , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Core Francisco Park , Hidenori Tanaka , Gautam Reddy , Noah D. Goodman

The transformer's remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) has sparked a wide range of studies designed to understand its strengths and limitations. However, a theoretical understanding of when ICL can and cannot generalize…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-30 Soo Min Kwon , Alec S. Xu , Can Yaras , Laura Balzano , Qing Qu

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

Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Chi Han , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhao , Heng Ji

Transformers have a remarkable ability to learn and execute tasks based on examples provided within the input itself, without explicit prior training. It has been argued that this capability, known as in-context learning (ICL), is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-06 Yue M. Lu , Mary I. Letey , Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Anindita Maiti , Cengiz Pehlevan

While large language models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, understandings of such capabilities are still in an early stage, where existing theory and mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Tianyu Guo , Wei Hu , Song Mei , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Silvio Savarese , Yu Bai

In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Roee Hendel , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson

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

Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

Transformers have become a standard architecture in machine learning, demonstrating strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities that allow them to learn from the prompt at inference time. However, uncertainty quantification for ICL remains…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-23 Zhe Huang , Simone Rossi , Rui Yuan , Thomas Hannagan

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

Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Songtao Lu , Xiaodong Cui , Pin-Yu Chen

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Chenyang Zhang , Yuan Cao

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remains poorly understood despite its consistent effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples. To clarify and improve these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Waïss Azizian , Ali Hasan

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

In-context learning (ICL) exhibits dual operating modes: task learning, i.e., acquiring a new skill from in-context samples, and task retrieval, i.e., locating and activating a relevant pretrained skill. Recent theoretical work investigates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Ziqian Lin , Kangwook Lee

Traditionally, neural network training has been primarily viewed as an approximation of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). This interpretation originated in a time when training for multiple epochs on small datasets was common and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Samuel Müller , Noah Hollmann , Frank Hutter