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Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Ekin Akyürek , Bailin Wang , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Faris Chaudhry , Siddhant Gadkari

In-context learning (ICL) improves language models' performance on a variety of NLP tasks by simply demonstrating a handful of examples at inference time. It is not well understood why ICL ability emerges, as the model has never been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Xiaochuang Han , Daniel Simig , Todor Mihaylov , Yulia Tsvetkov , Asli Celikyilmaz , Tianlu Wang

Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for AI, with the key ability of in-context learning (ICL), where they can perform well on unseen tasks based on a brief series of task examples without necessitating any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Zhenmei Shi , Junyi Wei , Zhuoyan Xu , Yingyu Liang

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-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

In-context learning refers to the ability of a model to condition on a prompt sequence consisting of in-context examples (input-output pairs corresponding to some task) along with a new query input, and generate the corresponding output.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Shivam Garg , Dimitris Tsipras , Percy Liang , Gregory Valiant

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

In this work, we explore the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks that were not encountered during training. To achieve this, we conduct synthetic experiments where the objective is to learn OOD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Qixun Wang , Yifei Wang , Yisen Wang , Xianghua Ying

The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Hongbo Li , Lingjie Duan , Yingbin Liang

The intriguing in-context learning (ICL) abilities of deep Transformer models have lately garnered significant attention. By studying in-context linear regression on unimodal Gaussian data, recent empirical and theoretical works have argued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

Transformers can efficiently learn in-context from example demonstrations. Most existing theoretical analyses studied the in-context learning (ICL) ability of transformers for linear function classes, where it is typically shown that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Kazusato Oko , Yujin Song , Taiji Suzuki , Denny Wu

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Madhur Panwar , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

Many recent language models (LMs) of Transformers family exhibit so-called in-context learning (ICL) ability, manifested in the LMs' ability to modulate their function by a task described in a natural language input. Previous work curating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Michal Štefánik , Marek Kadlčík

In-context learning (ICL) is a valuable capability exhibited by Transformers pretrained on diverse sequence tasks. However, previous studies have observed that ICL often conflicts with the model's inherent in-weight learning (IWL) ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Guanyu Chen , Ruichen Wang , Tianren Zhang , Feng Chen

Recent works have suggested that In-Context Learning (ICL) operates in dual modes, i.e. task retrieval (remember learned patterns from pre-training) and task learning (inference-time ''learning'' from demonstrations). However, disentangling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Zhouxiang Fang , Aayush Mishra , Muhan Gao , Anqi Liu , Daniel Khashabi

In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-24 Kaito Takanami , Takashi Takahashi , Yoshiyuki Kabashima

Task vectors offer a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Yuxin Dong , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu , Xia Ning

Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

We formalize a new concept for LLMs, context-enhanced learning. It involves standard gradient-based learning on text except that the context is enhanced with additional data on which no auto-regressive gradients are computed. This setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xingyu Zhu , Abhishek Panigrahi , Sanjeev Arora