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In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to acquire new behaviors from the input sequence alone without any parameter updates. Recent studies have shown that ICL can surpass the original meaning learned in pretraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yongyi Yang , Hidenori Tanaka , Wei Hu

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for easily adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to various tasks. However, our understanding of how ICL works remains limited. We explore a simple model of ICL in a controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Omar Naim , Guilhem Fouilhé , Nicholas Asher

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capacity to store and recall facts. Through experimentation with open-source models, we observe that this ability to retrieve facts can be easily manipulated by changing contexts, even without altering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Yibo Jiang , Goutham Rajendran , Pradeep Ravikumar , Bryon Aragam

In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Roee Hendel , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson

Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-23 Ruiqi Zhang , Spencer Frei , Peter L. Bartlett

Transformer models exhibit in-context learning: the ability to accurately predict the response to a novel query based on illustrative examples in the input sequence. In-context learning contrasts with traditional in-weights learning of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Gautam Reddy

Understanding the internal mechanisms of GPT-style transformers, particularly their capacity to perform in-context learning (ICL), is critical for advancing AI alignment and interpretability. In-context learning allows transformers to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Samarth Bhargav , Alexander Gu

In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to learn from a few examples provided in the prompt, enabling downstream generalization without the requirement for gradient updates. Despite encouragingly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Haitao Mao , Guangliang Liu , Yao Ma , Rongrong Wang , Kristen Johnson , Jiliang Tang

The current large language models are mainly based on decode-only structure transformers, which have great in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. It is generally believed that the important foundation of its ICL capability is the induction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Mingyu Xu , Wei Cheng , Bingning Wang , Weipeng Chen

Prior work on in-context copying has shown the existence of induction heads, which attend to and promote individual tokens during copying. In this work we discover a new type of induction head: concept-level induction heads, which copy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Sheridan Feucht , Eric Todd , Byron Wallace , David Bau

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

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

Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. We analyze a mechanism used in two LMs to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Jack Merullo , Carsten Eickhoff , Ellie Pavlick

In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Hakaze Cho , Mariko Kato , Yoshihiro Sakai , Naoya Inoue

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across diverse tasks, exhibiting emergent properties such as semantic prompt comprehension, In-Context Learning (ICL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Despite their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yuling Jiao , Yanming Lai , Huazhen Lin , Wensen Ma , Houduo Qi , Defeng Sun

Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning (IWL), where memorized information is encoded in model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Suraj Anand , Michael A. Lepori , Jack Merullo , Ellie Pavlick

In-context learning (ICL) emerges as a promising capability of large language models (LLMs) by providing them with demonstration examples to perform diverse tasks. However, the underlying mechanism of how LLMs learn from the provided…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Lean Wang , Lei Li , Damai Dai , Deli Chen , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Xu Sun

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

In-Context Learning (ICL) has been a powerful emergent property of large language models that has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In contrast to regular gradient-based learning, ICL is highly interpretable and does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Brian K Chen , Tianyang Hu , Hui Jin , Hwee Kuan Lee , Kenji Kawaguchi

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jiachen Jiang , Yuxin Dong , Jinxin Zhou , Zhihui Zhu