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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

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), 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

In-context learning (ICL) is a central capability of Transformer models, but the structures in data that enable its emergence and govern its robustness remain poorly understood. In this work, we study how the structure of pretraining tasks…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-01 Mary I. Letey , Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Yue M. Lu , Cengiz Pehlevan

This research addresses a fundamental question in AI: whether large language models truly understand concepts or simply recognize patterns. The authors propose bidirectional reasoning,the ability to apply transformations in both directions…

Sequence modelling requires determining which past tokens are causally relevant from the context and their importance: a process inherent to the attention layers in transformers, yet whose underlying learned mechanisms remain poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Francesco D'Angelo , Nicolas Flammarion

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

Transformers have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, but comprehending their internal mechanisms remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel geometric perspective that elucidates the inner…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Raul Molina

Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yuxuan Li , James L. McClelland

One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to learn in-context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight update when these patterns are presented in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Benoit Dherin , Michael Munn , Hanna Mazzawi , Michael Wunder , Javier Gonzalvo

When trained on language data, do transformers learn some arbitrary computation that utilizes the full capacity of the architecture or do they learn a simpler, tree-like computation, hypothesized to underlie compositional meaning systems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Shikhar Murty , Pratyusha Sharma , Jacob Andreas , Christopher D. Manning

Fine-tuning a pretrained transformer for a downstream task has become a standard method in NLP in the last few years. While the results from these models are impressive, applying them can be extremely computationally expensive, as is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Davis Yoshida , Allyson Ettinger , Kevin Gimpel

We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

In-context learning (ICL) -- the capacity of a model to infer and apply abstract patterns from examples provided within its input -- has been extensively studied in large language models trained for next-token prediction on human text. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Nathan Breslow , Aayush Mishra , Mahler Revsine , Michael C. Schatz , Anqi Liu , Daniel Khashabi

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

Fine-tuning pre-trained transformers is a powerful technique for enhancing the performance of base models on specific tasks. From early applications in models like BERT to fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), this approach has been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Suneel Nadipalli

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves updating at least a few billions of parameters. A more parameter-efficient approach is Prompt Tuning (PT), which updates only a few learnable tokens, and differently, In-Context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Tsachi Blau , Moshe Kimhi , Yonatan Belinkov , Alexander Bronstein , Chaim Baskin

Understanding in-context learning (ICL) capability that enables large language models (LLMs) to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples is of utmost importance. This importance stems not only from the better utilization of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yuxiang Zhou , Jiazheng Li , Yanzheng Xiang , Hanqi Yan , Lin Gui , Yulan He

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

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