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In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Tong Yang , Yu Huang , Yingbin Liang , Yuejie Chi

The emergence of In-Context Learning (ICL) in LLMs remains a remarkable phenomenon that is partially understood. To explain ICL, recent studies have created theoretical connections to Gradient Descent (GD). We ask, do such connections hold…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Lingfeng Shen , Aayush Mishra , Daniel Khashabi

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability for large language models (LLMs) to adapt to downstream tasks by leveraging a few (demonstration) examples. Despite its effectiveness, the mechanism behind ICL remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Pengfei He , Yingqian Cui , Han Xu , Hui Liu , Makoto Yamada , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

Generating rational and generally accurate responses to tasks, often accompanied by example demonstrations, highlights Large Language Model's (LLM's) remarkable In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities without requiring updates to the model's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Debanjan Dutta , Faizanuddin Ansari , Swagatam Das

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) enables large language models to perform new tasks by conditioning on a sequence of examples. Most prior work reasonably and intuitively assumes that which examples are chosen has a far greater effect on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Warren Li , Yiqian Wang , Zihan Wang , Jingbo Shang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven effective at In-Context Learning (ICL), an ability that allows them to create predictors from labeled examples. Few studies have explored the interplay between ICL and specific properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 David Oniani , Yanshan Wang

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful models that can learn concepts at the inference stage via in-context learning (ICL). While theoretical studies, e.g., \cite{zhang2023trained}, attempt to explain the mechanism of ICL, they assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yue Xing , Xiaofeng Lin , Chenheng Xu , Namjoon Suh , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jiachen Jiang , Yuxin Dong , Jinxin Zhou , Zhihui Zhu

In-context learning (ICL) -- the capacity of a model to infer and apply abstract patterns from examples provided within its input -- has been extensively studied in large language models trained for next-token prediction on human text. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Nathan Breslow , Aayush Mishra , Mahler Revsine , Michael C. Schatz , Anqi Liu , Daniel Khashabi

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the most powerful and most unexpected capabilities to emerge in recent transformer-based large language models (LLMs). Yet the mechanisms that underlie it are poorly understood. In this paper, we…

This paper investigates context stickiness in in-context learning (ICL), a phenomenon where earlier examples in a prompt interfere with a transformer's ability to adapt to later tasks. Using synthetic regression tasks over linear and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Hanna Rød , Dagny Streit , Nils Valseth Selte , Justin Li

The predictions of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks often improve significantly when including examples of the input--label relationship in the context. However, there is currently no consensus about how this in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Jannik Kossen , Yarin Gal , Tom Rainforth

Large Language Models(LLMs) have been attracting attention due to a ability called in-context learning(ICL). ICL, without updating the parameters of a LLM, it is possible to achieve highly accurate inference based on rules ``in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Toma Tanaka , Naofumi Emoto , Tsukasa Yumibayashi

In-Context Learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLM) has emerged as the dominant technique for performing natural language tasks, as it does not require updating the model parameters with gradient-based methods. ICL promises to "adapt"…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Georgios Chochlakis , Niyantha Maruthu Pandiyan , Kristina Lerman , Shrikanth Narayanan

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a technique by which language models make predictions based on examples provided in their input context. Previously, their context window size imposed a limit on the number of examples that can be shown, making…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jinheon Baek , Sun Jae Lee , Prakhar Gupta , Geunseob Oh , Siddharth Dalmia , Prateek Kolhar

Recent work has demonstrated that transformers and linear attention models can perform in-context learning (ICL) on simple function classes, such as linear regression. In this paper, we empirically study how these two attention mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Ayush Goel , Arjun Kohli , Sarvagya Somvanshi

Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Michael Hahn , Navin Goyal

In-context learning (ICL) emerges as a promising capability of large language models (LLMs) by providing them with demonstration examples to perform diverse tasks. However, the underlying mechanism of how LLMs learn from the provided…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Lean Wang , Lei Li , Damai Dai , Deli Chen , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Xu Sun

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising results in sentiment analysis through the in-context learning (ICL) paradigm. However, their ability to distinguish subtle sentiments still remains a challenge. Inspired by the human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Hongling Xu , Qianlong Wang , Yice Zhang , Min Yang , Xi Zeng , Bing Qin , Ruifeng Xu