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While multilingual large language models generally perform adequately, and sometimes even rival English performance on high-resource languages (HRLs), they often significantly underperform on low-resource languages (LRLs). Among several…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Yilei Tu , Andrew Xue , Freda Shi

Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Shohei Taniguchi , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Transformers exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where these models solve new tasks by using examples in the prompt without additional training. In our work, we identify and analyze two key components of ICL: (1) context-scaling, where model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Amirhesam Abedsoltan , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Jingfeng Wu , Mikhail Belkin

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables pretrained LLMs to adapt to downstream tasks by conditioning on a small set of input-output demonstrations, without any parameter updates. Although there have been many theoretical efforts to explain how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Xuhan Tong , Yuchen Zeng , Jiawei Zhang

In-context Learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to swiftly adapt to unseen tasks at inference-time by prefixing a few demonstration examples before queries. Despite its versatility, ICL incurs substantial computational and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Zhuowei Li , Zihao Xu , Ligong Han , Yunhe Gao , Song Wen , Di Liu , Hao Wang , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Steve Yadlowsky , Lyric Doshi , Nilesh Tripuraneni

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

In-context learning (ICL) has become the default method for using large language models (LLMs), making the exploration of its limitations and understanding the underlying causes crucial. In this paper, we find that ICL falls short of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Hao Peng , Xiaozhi Wang , Jianhui Chen , Weikai Li , Yunjia Qi , Zimu Wang , Zhili Wu , Kaisheng Zeng , Bin Xu , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

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

Real-world applications of large language models (LLMs) in computational social science (CSS) tasks primarily depend on the effectiveness of instruction tuning (IT) or in-context learning (ICL). While IT has shown highly effective at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Taihang Wang , Xiaoman Xu , Yimin Wang , Ye Jiang

Human listeners readily adjust to unfamiliar speakers and language varieties through exposure, but do these adaptation benefits extend to state-of-the-art spoken language models? We introduce a scalable framework that allows for in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Nathan Roll , Calbert Graham , Yuka Tatsumi , Kim Tien Nguyen , Meghan Sumner , Dan Jurafsky

Many recent language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL), manifested in the LMs' ability to perform a new task solely from natural-language instruction. Previous work curating in-context learners assumes that ICL emerges…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Michal Štefánik , Marek Kadlčík , Petr Sojka

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable effective in-context learning (ICL) with many-shot examples, but at the cost of high computational demand due to longer input tokens. To address this, we propose cheat-sheet ICL, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Ukyo Honda , Soichiro Murakami , Peinan Zhang

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

We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

In-context learning (ICL) has shown impressive results in few-shot learning tasks, yet its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. A recent line of work suggests that ICL performs gradient descent (GD)-based optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Gilad Deutch , Nadav Magar , Tomer Bar Natan , Guy Dar

In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks from a few examples, making it promising for languages underrepresented in pre-training. Recent work on many-shot ICL suggests that modern LLMs can further…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yinhan Lu , Gaganpreet Jhajj , Chen Zhang , Anietie Andy , David Ifeoluwa Adelani

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) is a remarkable capability of pretrained transformers that allows models to generalize to unseen tasks after seeing only a few examples. We investigate empirically the conditions necessary on the pretraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Chase Goddard , Lindsay M. Smith , Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. However, the underlying working mechanism of ICL remains poorly understood. Recent research presents two conflicting views on ICL: One emphasizes the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Anhao Zhao , Fanghua Ye , Jinlan Fu , Xiaoyu Shen