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

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Recent Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) demonstrate in-context learning ability to perform various functions based solely on the provided context, without updating model parameters. To fully utilize the in-context capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Yan Sun , Shihao Yang

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

Pre-trained Transformer language models (LM) have become go-to text representation encoders. Prior research fine-tunes deep LMs to encode text sequences such as sentences and passages into single dense vector representations for efficient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Luyu Gao , Jamie Callan

In-context learning (ICL) excels at new tasks from minimal examples, yet we still lack a mechanistic explanation of how few-shot prompts shape a model's function vector (FV)--a causal activation direction that drives task behavior on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Entang Wang , Yiwei Wang , Aleksandra Bakalova , Michael Hahn

Tabular foundation models have shown strong performance across various tabular learning tasks via in-context learning, offering robust generalization without any downstream finetuning. However, their inference-time costs remain high,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Jaris Küken , Lennart Purucker , Frank Hutter

Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shang Liu , Zhongze Cai , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

Previous theoretical results pertaining to meta-learning on sequences build on contrived assumptions and are somewhat convoluted. We introduce new information-theoretic tools that lead to an elegant and very general decomposition of error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Hong Jun Jeon , Jason D. Lee , Qi Lei , Benjamin Van Roy

We present an architecture that is effective for continual learning in an especially demanding setting, where task boundaries do not exist or are unknown, and where classes have to be learned online (with each example presented only once).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-08 Murray Shanahan , Christos Kaplanis , Jovana Mitrović

Task arithmetic refers to editing the pre-trained model by adding a weighted sum of task vectors, each of which is the weight update from the pre-trained model to fine-tuned models for certain tasks. This approach recently gained attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Hongkang Li , Yihua Zhang , Shuai Zhang , Meng Wang , Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen

We investigate the ability of transformers to perform in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL), where a model must infer and execute learning algorithms from trajectory data without parameter updates. We show that a linear self-attention…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Haodong Liang , Lifeng Lai

Agents of general intelligence deployed in real-world scenarios must adapt to ever-changing environmental conditions. While such adaptive agents may leverage engineered knowledge, they will require the capacity to construct and evaluate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-20 Craig Sherstan , Adam White , Marlos C. Machado , Patrick M. Pilarski

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of transformer-based language models, enabling them to perform tasks by conditioning on a small number of examples presented at inference time, without any parameter updates.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Jathin Korrapati , Patrick Mendoza , Aditya Tomar , Abein Abraham

Meta-learning enables rapid generalization to new tasks by learning knowledge from various tasks. It is intuitively assumed that as the training progresses, a model will acquire richer knowledge, leading to better generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Jingyao Wang , Yi Ren , Zeen Song , Jianqi Zhang , Changwen Zheng , Wenwen Qiang

Even though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in solving various natural language tasks, the capability of an LLM to follow human instructions is still a concern. Recent works have shown great improvements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Xinbo Wu , Lav R. Varshney

Large language models have shown tremendous performance in a variety of tasks. In-context learning -- the ability to improve at a task after being provided with a number of demonstrations -- is seen as one of the main contributors to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Julian Coda-Forno , Marcel Binz , Zeynep Akata , Matthew Botvinick , Jane X. Wang , Eric Schulz

A major reason behind the recent success of large language models (LLMs) is their \textit{in-context learning} capability, which makes it possible to rapidly adapt them to downstream text-based tasks by prompting them with a small number of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Keunwoo Peter Yu , Zheyuan Zhang , Fengyuan Hu , Shane Storks , Joyce Chai

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in modeling sequential data, including event sequences, temporal point processes, and irregular time series. Recently, transformers have largely replaced recurrent networks in these tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Ivan Karpukhin , Andrey Savchenko

Large language models, comprising billions of parameters and pre-trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have been claimed to acquire certain capabilities without having been specifically trained on them. These capabilities, referred to as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Sheng Lu , Irina Bigoulaeva , Rachneet Sachdeva , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

To generalize across tasks, an agent should acquire knowledge from past tasks that facilitate adaptation and exploration in future tasks. We focus on the problem of in-context adaptation and exploration, where an agent only relies on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Chentian Jiang , Nan Rosemary Ke , Hado van Hasselt

Long short-term memory(LSTM) units on sequence-based models are being used in translation, question-answering systems, classification tasks due to their capability of learning long-term dependencies. In Natural language generation, LSTM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-04 Sivasurya Santhanam