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The capability of predicting environmental dynamics underpins both biological neural systems and general embodied AI in adapting to their surroundings. Yet prevailing approaches rest on static world models that falter when confronted with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Fan Wang , Zhiyuan Chen , Yuxuan Zhong , Sunjian Zheng , Pengtao Shao , Bo Yu , Shaoshan Liu , Jianan Wang , Ning Ding , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown an impressive ability to perform a wide range of tasks using in-context learning (ICL), where a few examples are used to describe a task to the model. However, the performance of ICL varies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Keqin Peng , Liang Ding , Yancheng Yuan , Xuebo Liu , Min Zhang , Yuanxin Ouyang , Dacheng Tao

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

Previous work has showcased the intriguing capability of large language models (LLMs) in retrieving facts and processing context knowledge. However, only limited research exists on the layer-wise capability of LLMs to encode knowledge,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Tianjie Ju , Weiwei Sun , Wei Du , Xinwei Yuan , Zhaochun Ren , Gongshen Liu

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zheng Zhao , Yftah Ziser , Shay B. Cohen

Large language models (LLMs) famously exhibit emergent in-context learning (ICL) -- the ability to rapidly adapt to new tasks using few-shot examples provided as a prompt, without updating the model's weights. Built on top of LLMs, vision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Yongshuo Zong , Ondrej Bohdal , Timothy Hospedales

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities on textual data. We explore whether these capabilities can be extended to continuous vectors from diverse domains, obtained from black-box pretrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yufan Zhuang , Chandan Singh , Liyuan Liu , Jingbo Shang , Jianfeng Gao

Pre-trained large language models based on Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With just a few demonstration examples, the models can implement new tasks without any parameter updates. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Ruifeng Ren , Yong Liu

In this work, we study in-context teaching (ICT), where a teacher provides in-context example rationales to teach a student to reason over unseen cases. Human teachers are usually required to craft in-context demonstrations, which are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Jiachen Zhao , Zonghai Yao , Zhichao Yang , Hong Yu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent in-context learning (ICL) capabilities across a range of tasks, including zero-shot time-series forecasting. We show that text-trained foundation models can accurately extrapolate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Jiajun Bao , Nicolas Boullé , Toni J. B. Liu , Raphaël Sarfati , Christopher J. Earls

We investigate training strategies that co-develop in-context learning (ICL) and in-weights learning (IWL), and the ability to switch between them based on context relevance. Although current LLMs exhibit both modes, standard task-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Deeptanshu Malu , Deevyanshu Malu , Aditya Nemiwal , Sunita Sarawagi

Recent work has demonstrated that semantics specified by pretraining data influence how representations of different concepts are organized in a large language model (LLM). However, given the open-ended nature of LLMs, e.g., their ability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Core Francisco Park , Andrew Lee , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Yongyi Yang , Maya Okawa , Kento Nishi , Martin Wattenberg , Hidenori Tanaka

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

In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Faris Chaudhry , Siddhant Gadkari

Transformers have emerged as the dominant architecture in the field of deep learning, with a broad range of applications and remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. While not yet fully understood, ICL has already proved to be an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Arik Reuter , Tim G. J. Rudner , Vincent Fortuin , David Rügamer

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of In-Context Learning (ICL) by addressing several open questions: (a) What type of ICL estimator is learned by large language models? (b) What is a proper performance metric for ICL and what…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-11 Yufeng Zhang , Fengzhuo Zhang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

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

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have become state-of-the-art for many computer vision tasks, with in-context learning (ICL) as a popular adaptation strategy for new ones. But can VLMs learn novel concepts purely from visual…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Bowen Zhao , Leo Parker Dirac , Paulina Varshavskaya

Large Language Models (LLMs) with in-context learning (ICL) ability can quickly adapt to a specific context given a few demonstrations (demos). Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) built upon LLMs have also shown multimodal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Shuo Chen , Zhen Han , Bailan He , Jianzhe Liu , Mark Buckley , Yao Qin , Philip Torr , Volker Tresp , Jindong Gu

In everyday conversations, humans can take on different roles and adapt their vocabulary to their chosen roles. We explore whether LLMs can take on, that is impersonate, different roles when they generate text in-context. We ask LLMs to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Leonard Salewski , Stephan Alaniz , Isabel Rio-Torto , Eric Schulz , Zeynep Akata