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Continual learning in environments with shifting data distributions is a challenging problem with several real-world applications. In this paper we consider settings in which the data distribution(task) shifts abruptly and the timing of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Mengda Xu , Sumitra Ganesh , Pranay Pasula

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

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable task generalization, solving tasks they were never explicitly trained on with only a few demonstrations. This raises a fundamental question: When can learning from a small set of tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Amirhesam Abedsoltan , Huaqing Zhang , Kaiyue Wen , Hongzhou Lin , Jingzhao Zhang , Mikhail Belkin

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

The fine-tuning of deep pre-trained models has revealed compositional properties, with multiple specialized modules that can be arbitrarily composed into a single, multi-task model. However, identifying the conditions that promote…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Angelo Porrello , Lorenzo Bonicelli , Pietro Buzzega , Monica Millunzi , Simone Calderara , Rita Cucchiara

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

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

Self-supervised large language models have demonstrated the ability to perform Machine Translation (MT) via in-context learning, but little is known about where the model performs the task with respect to prompt instructions and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Suzanna Sia , David Mueller , Kevin Duh

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Xingxuan Zhang , Haoran Wang , Jiansheng Li , Yuan Xue , Shikai Guan , Renzhe Xu , Hao Zou , Han Yu , Peng Cui

Recent studies have put into question the belief that emergent abilities in language models are exclusive to large models. This skepticism arises from two observations: 1) smaller models can also exhibit high performance on emergent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Zhengxiao Du , Aohan Zeng , Yuxiao Dong , Jie Tang

Human intelligence is characterized not only by the capacity to learn complex skills, but the ability to rapidly adapt and acquire new skills within an ever-changing environment. In this work we study how the learning of modular solutions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Jianan Wang , Eren Sezener , David Budden , Marcus Hutter , Joel Veness

We show that utilizing attribution maps for training neural networks can improve regularization of models and thus increase performance. Regularization is key in deep learning, especially when training complex models on relatively small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Christian Tomani , Daniel Cremers

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

Large language models (LLM) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-3 offer unique testbeds for exploring the translation challenges of turning literacy into numeracy. Previous publicly-available transformer models from eighteen months prior and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-01 David Noever , Forrest McKee

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) enables large pre-trained language models (PLMs) to make predictions for unseen inputs without updating parameters. Despite its potential, ICL's effectiveness heavily relies on the quality,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Xiaoling Zhou , Wei Ye , Yidong Wang , Chaoya Jiang , Zhemg Lee , Rui Xie , Shikun Zhang

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

Large language models like GPT-4 exhibit emergent capabilities across general-purpose tasks, such as basic arithmetic, when trained on extensive text data, even though these tasks are not explicitly encoded by the unsupervised, next-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Nayoung Lee , Kartik Sreenivasan , Jason D. Lee , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos

Instruction tuning -- tuning large language models on instruction-output pairs -- is a promising technique for making models better adapted to the real world. Yet, the key factors driving the model's capability to understand and follow…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Dylan Zhang , Justin Wang , Francois Charton

Large language models show a surprising in-context learning ability -- being able to use a prompt to form a prediction for a query, yet without additional training, in stark contrast to old-fashioned supervised learning. Providing a…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-07-25 Yuhao Li , Ruoran Bai , Haiping Huang