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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

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Liuwang Kang , Fan Wang , Shaoshan Liu , Hung-Chyun Chou , Chuan Lin , Ning Ding

Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Eric J. Bigelow , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka , Tomer D. Ullman

In-context learning (ICL) has become a prominent paradigm to rapidly customize LLMs to new tasks without fine-tuning. However, despite the empirical evidence of its usefulness, we still do not truly understand how ICL works. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Harshita Narnoli , Mihai Surdeanu

Large language models have shown tremendous performance in a variety of tasks. In-context learning -- the ability to improve at a task after being provided with a number of demonstrations -- is seen as one of the main contributors to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Julian Coda-Forno , Marcel Binz , Zeynep Akata , Matthew Botvinick , Jane X. Wang , Eric Schulz

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

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) as it empowers them to comprehend and reason across interconnected inputs. Evaluating the ICL ability of LLMs can enhance their utilization and deepen our…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Wentong Chen , Yankai Lin , ZhenHao Zhou , HongYun Huang , Yantao Jia , Zhao Cao , Ji-Rong Wen

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

In-context learning (ICL) i.e. showing LLMs only a few task-specific demonstrations has led to downstream gains with no task-specific fine-tuning required. However, LLMs are sensitive to the choice of prompts, and therefore a crucial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Lingyu Gao , Aditi Chaudhary , Krishna Srinivasan , Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform new tasks by conditioning on prompts with relevant information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances ICL by incorporating retrieved documents into the LLM's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Marie Al Ghossein , Emile Contal , Alexandre Robicquet

In Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs), the efficacy of In-Context Learning (ICL) remains limited by challenges in cross-modal interactions and representation disparities. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel Visual…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Yucheng Zhou , Xiang Li , Qianning Wang , Jianbing Shen

The emergence of long-context large language models (LLMs) has enabled the use of hundreds, or even thousands, of demonstrations for in-context learning (ICL) - a previously impractical regime. This paper investigates whether traditional…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Arjun R. Akula , Kazuma Hashimoto , Krishna Srinivasan , Aditi Chaudhary , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

The remarkable ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand and follow instructions has sometimes been limited by their in-context learning (ICL) performance in low-resource languages. To address this, we introduce a novel approach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Xiaoqian Li , Ercong Nie , Sheng Liang

Large language models (LMs) such as GPT-3 have the surprising ability to do in-context learning, where the model learns to do a downstream task simply by conditioning on a prompt consisting of input-output examples. The LM learns from these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Sang Michael Xie , Aditi Raghunathan , Percy Liang , Tengyu Ma

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

In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Hakaze Cho , Mariko Kato , Yoshihiro Sakai , Naoya Inoue

In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 William L. Tong , Cengiz Pehlevan

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) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations in the prompt. Two different mechanisms have been proposed to explain ICL: induction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kayo Yin , Jacob Steinhardt

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context reasoning capabilities across a wide range of tasks, particularly with unstructured inputs such as language or images. However, LLMs struggle to handle structured data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Jintang Li , Ruofan Wu , Yuchang Zhu , Huizhe Zhang , Liang Chen , Zibin Zheng