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Humans and animals show remarkable learning efficiency, adapting to new environments with minimal experience. This capability is not well captured by standard reinforcement learning algorithms that rely on incremental value updates. Rapid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ching Fang , Kanaka Rajan

Training autonomous agents that can learn new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations is a long-standing problem in machine learning. Recently, transformers have been shown to learn new language or vision tasks without any weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Sharath Chandra Raparthy , Eric Hambro , Robert Kirk , Mikael Henaff , Roberta Raileanu

Recent advancements in language models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning abilities, prompting the exploration of in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) to extend the promise to decision domains. Due to involving more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Jinmei Liu , Fuhong Liu , Zhenhong Sun , Jianye Hao , Huaxiong Li , Bo Wang , Daoyi Dong , Chunlin Chen , Zhi Wang

Existing offline in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) methods have predominantly relied on supervised training objectives, which are known to have limitations in offline RL settings. In this study, we explore the integration of RL…

Recent work has shown that Transformers can perform in-context learning for linear regression under restrictive assumptions, including i.i.d. data, Gaussian noise, and Gaussian regression coefficients. However, real-world data often violate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Hoang T. H. Cao , Hai D. V. Trinh , Tho Quan , Lan V. Truong

Graph In-Context Learning, with the ability to adapt pre-trained graph models to novel and diverse downstream graphs without updating any parameters, has gained much attention in the community. The key to graph in-context learning is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Rui Lv , Zaixi Zhang , Kai Zhang , Qi Liu , Weibo Gao , Jiawei Liu , Jiaxia Yan , Linan Yue , Fangzhou Yao

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

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

Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling (RALM) methods, which condition a language model (LM) on relevant documents from a grounding corpus during generation, were shown to significantly improve language modeling performance. In addition,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Ori Ram , Yoav Levine , Itay Dalmedigos , Dor Muhlgay , Amnon Shashua , Kevin Leyton-Brown , Yoav Shoham

What if artificial intelligence could not only solve problems for which it was trained but also learn to teach itself to solve new problems (i.e., meta-learn)? In this study, we demonstrate that a pre-trained transformer fine-tuned with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

Transformers have shown a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), making predictions based on contextual examples. However, while theoretical analyses have explored this prediction capability, the nature of the inferred context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Fei Lu , Yue Yu

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning, the ability to use information provided as context to improve prediction of future tokens. Induction heads have been argued to play a crucial role for in-context learning in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Tankred Saanum , Can Demircan , Samuel J. Gershman , Eric Schulz

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in settings that require reliable long-context understanding, such as retrieval-augmented generation and multi-document reasoning. A common strategy is to fine-tune pretrained short-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zichong Li , Chen Liang , Liliang Ren , Tuo Zhao , Yelong Shen , Weizhu Chen

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

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) enjoys several benefits, such as data-efficiency and planning, by learning a model of the environment's dynamics. However, learning a global model that can generalize across different dynamics is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Kimin Lee , Younggyo Seo , Seunghyun Lee , Honglak Lee , Jinwoo Shin

When adapting large language models (LLMs) to a specific downstream task, two primary approaches are commonly employed: (1) prompt engineering, often with in-context few-shot learning, leveraging the model's inherent generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Jorg Bornschein , Clare Lyle , Yazhe Li , Amal Rannen-Triki , Xu Owen He , Razvan Pascanu

Non-stationary sequences arise naturally in control, forecasting, and decision-making. The data-generating process shifts at unknown times, and models must detect the change, discard or downweight obsolete evidence, and adapt to new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Carson Dudley , Yutong Bi , Xiaofeng Liu , Samet Oymak

Test-time training (TTT) methods explicitly update the weights of a model to adapt to the specific test instance, and they have found success in a variety of settings, including most recently language modeling and reasoning. To demystify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Halil Alperen Gozeten , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Xuechen Zhang , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Marco Mondelli , Samet Oymak

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks by prompting them with a sequence of training examples. However, it is known that ICL is very sensitive to the choice of training examples: randomly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Ting-Yun Chang , Robin Jia

In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to solve novel tasks without weight updates. Despite its empirical success, the mechanism behind ICL remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to interpret, improve, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Chengye Li , Haiyun Liu , Yuanxi Li