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Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Steve Yadlowsky , Lyric Doshi , Nilesh Tripuraneni

Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformer-based architectures, have been recently shown to have the capacity to carry out in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a decision on a new input is made via a direct mapping of the input…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Matteo Zecchin , Kai Yu , Osvaldo Simeone

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

Encoder transformer models compress information from all tokens in a sequence into a single [CLS] token to represent global context. This approach risks diluting fine-grained or hierarchical features, leading to information loss in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Asif Shahriar , Rifat Shahriyar , M Saifur Rahman

Pre-trained large language models based on Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With just a few demonstration examples, the models can implement new tasks without any parameter updates. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Ruifeng Ren , Yong Liu

Although transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities for in-context learning (ICL) in practice, theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanism that allows transformers to perform ICL is still in its infancy. This work aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Shen , Ruida Zhou , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities on textual data. We explore whether these capabilities can be extended to continuous vectors from diverse domains, obtained from black-box pretrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yufan Zhuang , Chandan Singh , Liyuan Liu , Jingbo Shang , Jianfeng Gao

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

In-context learning (ICL) allows transformer-based language models that are pre-trained on general text to quickly learn a specific task with a few "task demonstrations" without updating their parameters, significantly boosting their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Zijian Zhou , Xiaoqiang Lin , Xinyi Xu , Alok Prakash , Daniela Rus , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

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

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of large pretrained transformers, enabling them to solve new tasks implicit in example input-output pairs without any gradient updates. Despite its practical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Joshua Hill , Benjamin Eyre , Elliot Creager

Transformer neural networks can exhibit a surprising capacity for in-context learning (ICL) despite not being explicitly trained for it. Prior work has provided a deeper understanding of how ICL emerges in transformers, e.g. through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Aaditya K. Singh , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Ted Moskovitz , Erin Grant , Andrew M. Saxe , Felix Hill

In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent task/function vector in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong , Taiji Suzuki

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. Despite extensive empirical studies, a principled understanding of ICL emergence at scale remains more elusive. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sushant Mehta , Ishan Gupta

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform new tasks from in-context demonstrations, a phenomenon known as in-context learning (ICL). Recent work suggests that these demonstrations are compressed into task vectors (TVs), compact task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haolin Yang , Hakaze Cho , Kaize Ding , Naoya Inoue

Recent breakthroughs in deep learning often rely on representation learning and knowledge transfer. In recent years, unsupervised and self-supervised techniques for learning speech representation were developed to foster automatic speech…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Pierre Beckmann , Mikolaj Kegler , Milos Cernak

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

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a key capability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), driven by their increasing scale and applicability. Despite its promise, effective ICL in the multimodal setting remains…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Yanshu Li

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