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In-context learning (ICL) is a remarkable capability of pretrained transformers that allows models to generalize to unseen tasks after seeing only a few examples. We investigate empirically the conditions necessary on the pretraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Chase Goddard , Lindsay M. Smith , Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

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) describes a language model's ability to generate outputs based on a set of input demonstrations and a subsequent query. To understand this remarkable capability, researchers have studied simplified, stylized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Jaeyeon Kim , Sehyun Kwon , Joo Young Choi , Jongho Park , Jaewoong Cho , Jason D. Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to learn in-context, allowing them to perform various tasks based on a few input-output examples. However, the effectiveness of in-context learning is heavily reliant on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-29 Liang Wang , Nan Yang , Furu Wei

In-context learning (ICL) is an effective approach to help large language models (LLMs) adapt to various tasks by providing demonstrations of the target task. Considering the high cost of labeling demonstrations, many methods propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Dingzirui Wang , Xuanliang Zhang , Qiguang Chen , Longxu Dou , Xiao Xu , Rongyu Cao , Yingwei Ma , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Binhua Li , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

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

While LLMs have revolutionized the field of machine learning due to their high performance on a strikingly wide range of problems, they are also known to hallucinate false answers and underperform on less canonical versions of the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Kavi Gupta , Kate Sanders , Armando Solar-Lezama

In-context learning (ICL) is a valuable capability exhibited by Transformers pretrained on diverse sequence tasks. However, previous studies have observed that ICL often conflicts with the model's inherent in-weight learning (IWL) ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Guanyu Chen , Ruichen Wang , Tianren Zhang , Feng Chen

Transformers demonstrate significant advantages as the building block of modern LLMs. In this work, we study the capacities of Transformers in performing unsupervised learning. We show that multi-layered Transformers, given a sufficiently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-14 Yihan He , Yuan Cao , Hong-Yu Chen , Dennis Wu , Jianqing Fan , Han Liu

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, yet their potential for sequential decision-making remains underexplored. In this paper, we study the ICL capabilities of LLMs in sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Minmin Zhang , Sina Aghaei , Soroush Saghafian

The success of transformers is often linked to their ability to perform in-context learning. Recent work shows that transformers are universal in context, capable of approximating any real-valued continuous function of a context (a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-06 Anastasis Kratsios , Takashi Furuya

When large language models (LLMs) use in-context learning (ICL) to solve a new task, they must infer latent concepts from demonstration examples. This raises the question of whether and how transformers represent latent structures as part…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Guan Zhe Hong , Bhavya Vasudeva , Vatsal Sharan , Cyrus Rashtchian , Prabhakar Raghavan , Rina Panigrahy

In-context learning (ICL) enables transformers to adapt to new tasks through contextual examples without parameter updates. While existing research has typically studied ICL in fixed-complexity environments, practical language models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Puneesh Deora , Bhavya Vasudeva , Tina Behnia , Christos Thrampoulidis

Understanding the inner workings of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing their theoretical foundations and real-world applications. While the attention mechanism and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) have been studied…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Clement Neo , Shay B. Cohen , Fazl Barez

State-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) ground the vision and the language modality primarily via projecting the vision tokens from the encoder to language-like tokens, which are directly fed to the Large Language Model (LLM)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Sivan Doveh , Shaked Perek , M. Jehanzeb Mirza , Wei Lin , Amit Alfassy , Assaf Arbelle , Shimon Ullman , Leonid Karlinsky

Large language models (LLMs) can perform a new task by merely conditioning on task instructions and a few input-output examples, without optimizing any parameters. This is called In-Context Learning (ICL). In-context Information Extraction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Chaoxu Pang , Yixuan Cao , Qiang Ding , Ping Luo

This paper explores the elusive mechanism underpinning in-context learning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Our work provides a novel perspective by examining in-context learning via the lens of surface repetitions. We quantitatively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Jianhao Yan , Jin Xu , Chiyu Song , Chenming Wu , Yafu Li , Yue Zhang

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Sewon Min , Xinxi Lyu , Ari Holtzman , Mikel Artetxe , Mike Lewis , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Luke Zettlemoyer

By allowing models to predict without task-specific training, in-context learning (ICL) with pretrained LLMs has enormous potential in NLP. However, a number of problems persist in ICL. In particular, its performance is sensitive to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Zhichao Xu , Daniel Cohen , Bei Wang , Vivek Srikumar

While in-context learning (ICL) has achieved remarkable success in natural language and vision domains, its theoretical understanding-particularly in the context of structured geometric data-remains unexplored. This paper initiates a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhaiming Shen , Alexander Hsu , Rongjie Lai , Wenjing Liao