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Related papers: Task Vectors in In-Context Learning: Emergence, Fo…

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Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

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

Large transformer models trained on diverse datasets have shown a remarkable ability to learn in-context, achieving high few-shot performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained to solve. In this paper, we study the in-context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Jonathan N. Lee , Annie Xie , Aldo Pacchiano , Yash Chandak , Chelsea Finn , Ofir Nachum , Emma Brunskill

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie

We investigate the capacity of transformers to learn algorithms involving their context while solely being trained using next token prediction. We set up Markov chains with random transition matrices and we train transformers to predict the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Simon Lepage , Jeremie Mary , David Picard

In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Kartik Ahuja , David Lopez-Paz

We argue that in-context learning (ICL) predictably arises from standard self-supervised next-token pretraining, rather than being an exotic emergent property. This work establishes the foundational principles of this emergence by focusing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Paul M. Riechers , Henry R. Bigelow , Eric A. Alt , Adam Shai

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

In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters. Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Noam Wies , Yoav Levine , Amnon Shashua

Unsupervised meta-learning aims to learn feature representations from unsupervised datasets that can transfer to downstream tasks with limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to unsupervised meta-learning that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Anna Vettoruzzo , Lorenzo Braccaioli , Joaquin Vanschoren , Marlena Nowaczyk

Large language models (LLMs) exploit in-context learning (ICL) to solve tasks with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not yet well-understood. Some works suggest that LLMs only recall already learned concepts from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Jane Pan , Tianyu Gao , Howard Chen , Danqi Chen

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

Visual Prompting is a technique for teaching models to perform a visual task via in-context examples, without any additional training. In this work, we analyze the activations of MAE-VQGAN, a recent Visual Prompting model, and find task…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Alberto Hojel , Yutong Bai , Trevor Darrell , Amir Globerson , Amir Bar

Transformers have exhibited exceptional capabilities in sequence modeling tasks, leveraging self-attention and in-context learning. Critical to this success are induction heads, attention circuits that enable copying tokens based on their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Francesco D'Angelo , Francesco Croce , Nicolas Flammarion

Large transformer models have been shown to be capable of performing in-context learning. By using examples in a prompt as well as a query, they are capable of performing tasks such as few-shot, one-shot, or zero-shot learning to output the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Antony Zhao , Alex Proshkin , Fergal Hennessy , Francesco Crivelli

Modern distributed networks, notably transformers, acquire a remarkable ability (termed `in-context learning') to adapt their computation to input statistics, such that a fixed network can be applied to data from a broad range of systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Cole Gibson , Wenping Cui , Gautam Reddy

In this paper, we explore the potential of visual in-context learning to enable a single model to handle multiple tasks and adapt to new tasks during test time without re-training. Unlike previous approaches, our focus is on training…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Simon Reiß , Zdravko Marinov , Alexander Jaus , Constantin Seibold , M. Saquib Sarfraz , Erik Rodner , Rainer Stiefelhagen

Transformer models exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL), adapting to novel tasks from examples within their context, yet the underlying mechanisms remain largely mysterious. Here, we provide an exact analytical characterization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Nischal Mainali , Lucas Teixeira

The in-context learning capabilities of modern language models have motivated a deeper mathematical understanding of sequence models. A line of recent work has shown that linear attention models can emulate projected gradient descent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Xiangyu Chang , Yingcong Li , Muti Kara , Samet Oymak , Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury