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In-context learning (ICL) is an important yet not fully understood ability of pre-trained large language models (LLMs). It can greatly enhance task performance using a few examples, termed demonstrations, without fine-tuning. Although…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Do Xuan Long , Duong Ngoc Yen , Do Xuan Trong , Luu Anh Tuan , Kenji Kawaguchi , Shafiq Joty , Min-Yen Kan , Nancy F. Chen

In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn tasks from demonstration examples without parameter updates. Although it has been extensively studied in LLMs, its effectiveness in Vision-Language Models (VLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Gabriel O. dos Santos , Esther Colombini , Sandra Avila

Continual learning (CL) is an important technique to allow artificial neural networks to work in open environments. CL enables a system to learn new tasks without severe interference to its performance on old tasks, i.e., overcome the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Liangxuan Guo , Yang Chen , Shan Yu

In-context learning (ICL) enables transformers to adapt to new tasks through contextual examples without parameter updates. While existing research has typically studied ICL in fixed-complexity environments, practical language models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Puneesh Deora , Bhavya Vasudeva , Tina Behnia , Christos Thrampoulidis

In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm for generalized In-Context Learning (ICL), termed Indirect In-Context Learning. In Indirect ICL, we explore demonstration selection strategies tailored for two distinct real-world scenarios:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Hadi Askari , Shivanshu Gupta , Terry Tong , Fei Wang , Anshuman Chhabra , Muhao Chen

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

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables transformer-based language models to adapt to new tasks by conditioning on demonstration examples. However, traditional example-driven in-context learning lacks explicit modules for knowledge retrieval and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Pan Chen , Shaohong Chen , Mark Wang , Shi Xuan Leong , Priscilla Fung , Varinia Bernales , Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Large language models (LLMs) can perform a new task by merely conditioning on task instructions and a few input-output examples, without optimizing any parameters. This is called In-Context Learning (ICL). In-context Information Extraction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Chaoxu Pang , Yixuan Cao , Qiang Ding , Ping Luo

In-context learning (ICL), which promotes inference with several demonstrations, has become a widespread paradigm to stimulate LLM capabilities for downstream tasks. Due to context length constraints, it cannot be further improved in spite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jiahao Li , Quan Wang , Licheng Zhang , Guoqing Jin , Zhendong Mao

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

Regression and Bayesian accounts of in-context learning (ICL) explain how demonstrations can induce predictors, while mechanistic analyses often identify compact activation directions that steer prompted behavior. However, it remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Wei Tang , Xinyan Jiang , Fakhri Karray , Lijie Hu

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 sometimes appear to be creative, solving novel tasks often with a few demonstrations in the prompt. These tasks require the models to generalize on distributions different from those from training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Jiajun Song , Zhuoyan Xu , Yiqiao Zhong

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

Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Chi Han , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhao , Heng Ji

In-context learning (ICL) is an important paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new tasks, but the generalization behavior of ICL remains poorly understood. We investigate the inductive biases of ICL from the perspective of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Chenglei Si , Dan Friedman , Nitish Joshi , Shi Feng , Danqi Chen , He He

We investigate the transformer's capability to simulate the training process of deep models via in-context learning (ICL), i.e., in-context deep learning. Our key contribution is providing a positive example of using a transformer to train…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Weimin Wu , Maojiang Su , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Zhao Song , Han Liu

Transformers excel at in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from demonstrations without parameter updates -- but how they do so remains a mystery. Recent work suggests that Transformers may internally run Gradient Descent (GD), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Deqing Fu , Tian-Qi Chen , Robin Jia , Vatsal Sharan

The remarkable ability of transformers to learn new concepts solely by reading examples within the input prompt, termed in-context learning (ICL), is a crucial aspect of intelligent behavior. Here, we focus on understanding the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sara Dragutinović , Andrew M. Saxe , Aaditya K. Singh

The capability of in-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform novel tasks without parameter updates by conditioning on a few input-output examples. However, collecting high-quality examples for new or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Zihan Chen , Song Wang , Xingbo Fu , Chengshuai Shi , Zhenyu Lei , Cong Shen , Jundong Li