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Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities, but the mechanisms underlying relational reasoning remain poorly understood. We investigate how transformers perform \textit{transitive inference}, a classic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jesse Geerts , Andrew Liu , Stephanie Chan , Claudia Clopath , Kimberly Stachenfeld

Transformers exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where these models solve new tasks by using examples in the prompt without additional training. In our work, we identify and analyze two key components of ICL: (1) context-scaling, where model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Amirhesam Abedsoltan , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Jingfeng Wu , Mikhail Belkin

In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Aaron Mueller , Albert Webson , Jackson Petty , Tal Linzen

In-context learning (ICL) allows transformer-based language models that are pre-trained on general text to quickly learn a specific task with a few "task demonstrations" without updating their parameters, significantly boosting their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Zijian Zhou , Xiaoqiang Lin , Xinyi Xu , Alok Prakash , Daniela Rus , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

Large language models (LLM) have recently shown the extraordinary ability to perform unseen tasks based on few-shot examples provided as text, also known as in-context learning (ICL). While recent works have attempted to understand the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Harmon Bhasin , Timothy Ossowski , Yiqiao Zhong , Junjie Hu

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

Large language models (LLMs) like transformers demonstrate impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, allowing them to make predictions for new tasks based on prompt exemplars without parameter updates. While existing ICL theories…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Kevin Christian Wibisono , Yixin Wang

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a particularly remarkable characteristic of Large Language Models (LLM): given a pretrained LLM and an observed dataset, LLMs can make predictions for new data points from the same distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Fabian Falck , Ziyu Wang , Chris Holmes

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of transformer-based language models, enabling them to perform tasks by conditioning on a small number of examples presented at inference time, without any parameter updates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Jathin Korrapati , Patrick Mendoza , Aditya Tomar , Abein Abraham

The intriguing in-context learning (ICL) abilities of deep Transformer models have lately garnered significant attention. By studying in-context linear regression on unimodal Gaussian data, recent empirical and theoretical works have argued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

Transformer-based multimodal large language models often exhibit in-context learning (ICL) abilities. Motivated by this phenomenon, we ask: how do transformers learn to associate information across modalities from in-context examples? We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yiran Huang , Karsten Roth , Quentin Bouniot , Wenjia Xu , Zeynep Akata

We argue that in-context learning (ICL) predictably arises from standard self-supervised next-token pretraining, rather than being an exotic emergent property. This work establishes the foundational principles of this emergence by focusing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Paul M. Riechers , Henry R. Bigelow , Eric A. Alt , Adam Shai

This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Josef Ott

In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Kartik Ahuja , David Lopez-Paz

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

Large transformer models pretrained on offline reinforcement learning datasets have demonstrated remarkable in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) capabilities, where they can make good decisions when prompted with interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Licong Lin , Yu Bai , Song Mei

Pretrained Transformers demonstrate remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. However, theoretical studies often rely on simplified architectures…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Samet Demir , Zafer Dogan

The remarkable ability of transformers to learn new concepts solely by reading examples within the input prompt, termed in-context learning (ICL), is a crucial aspect of intelligent behavior. Here, we focus on understanding the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sara Dragutinović , Andrew M. Saxe , Aaditya K. Singh

In-context learning refers to the ability of a model to condition on a prompt sequence consisting of in-context examples (input-output pairs corresponding to some task) along with a new query input, and generate the corresponding output.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Shivam Garg , Dimitris Tsipras , Percy Liang , Gregory Valiant