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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

What is the relationship between model architecture and the ability to perform in-context learning? In this empirical study, we take the first steps toward answering this question. We evaluate thirteen model architectures capable of causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Ivan Lee , Nan Jiang , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

Large language models (LLM) in natural language processing (NLP) have demonstrated great potential for in-context learning (ICL) -- the ability to leverage a few sets of example prompts to adapt to various tasks without having to explicitly…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Trevine Oorloff , Vishwanath Sindagi , Wele Gedara Chaminda Bandara , Ali Shafahi , Amin Ghiasi , Charan Prakash , Reza Ardekani

Despite the surprising few-shot performance of in-context learning (ICL), it is still a common practice to randomly sample examples to serve as context. This paper advocates a new principle for ICL: self-adaptive in-context learning. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Zhiyong Wu , Yaoxiang Wang , Jiacheng Ye , Lingpeng Kong

An intriguing property of the Transformer is its ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), where the Transformer can solve different inference tasks without parameter updating based on the contextual information provided by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Renpu Liu , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Guangyu Li , Meng Ding , Lijie Hu

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

In-context learning (ICL)-the ability of transformer-based models to perform new tasks from examples provided at inference time-has emerged as a hallmark of modern language models. While recent works have investigated the mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-23 Soham Bonnerjee , Zhen Wei , Yeon , Anna Asch , Sagnik Nandy , Promit Ghosal

In-context learning (ICL) is an astonishing emergent ability of large language models (LLMs). By presenting a prompt that includes multiple input-output pairs as examples and introducing a new query input, models can generate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Timothy Chu , Zhao Song , Chiwun Yang

This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Tomoya Wakayama , Taiji Suzuki

In-context learning (ICL) is an emerging capability of large autoregressive language models where a few input-label demonstrations are appended to the input to enhance the model's understanding of downstream NLP tasks, without directly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Zhuocheng Gong , Jiahao Liu , Qifan Wang , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Dongyan Zhao , Rui Yan

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Baturay Saglam , Xinyang Hu , Zhuoran Yang , Dionysis Kalogerias , Amin Karbasi

In-context learning (ICL) allows some autoregressive models to solve tasks via next-token prediction and without needing further training. This has led to claims about these model's ability to solve (learn) unseen tasks with only a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Adrian de Wynter

Linear attention methods offer a compelling alternative to softmax attention due to their efficiency in recurrent decoding. Recent research has focused on enhancing standard linear attention by incorporating gating while retaining its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Yingcong Li , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Ankit Singh Rawat , Maryam Fazel , Samet Oymak

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

This paper investigates the expected excess risk of in-context learning (ICL) for multiclass classification. We formalize each task as a sequence of labeled examples followed by a query input; a pretrained model then estimates the query's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-03 Chenrui Liu , Falong Tan , Chuanlong Xie , Yicheng Zeng , Lixing Zhu

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective approach to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness varies significantly across models and tasks, posing challenges for practitioners to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Dingzriui Wang , Xuanliang Zhang , Keyan Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Yang Deng

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the process of adding a small number of localized examples from a training set of labelled data to an LLM's prompt with an objective to effectively control the generative process seeking to improve the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Manish Chandra , Debasis Ganguly , Iadh Ounis

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, adapting to new tasks by simply conditioning on demonstrations without parameter updates. Compelling empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that ICL, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Taejong Joo , Diego Klabjan

In-context learning (ICL) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) are two common strategies for improving the performance of modern large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. Despite their different natures, these strategies often lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Diego Doimo , Alessandro Serra , Alessio Ansuini , Alberto Cazzaniga