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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

We consider problems in sequential decision making with natural multi-level structure, where sub-tasks are assembled together to accomplish complex goals. Systematically inferring and leveraging hierarchical structure has remained a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Sichen Yang , Mauro Maggioni

We introduce iterative retrieval, a novel framework that empowers retrievers to make iterative decisions through policy optimization. Finding an optimal portfolio of retrieved items is a combinatorial optimization problem, generally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Yunmo Chen , Tongfei Chen , Harsh Jhamtani , Patrick Xia , Richard Shin , Jason Eisner , Benjamin Van Durme

Large-scale Transformer language models (LMs) trained solely on next-token prediction with web-scale data can solve a wide range of tasks after seeing just a few examples. The mechanism behind this capability, known as in-context learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Jingcheng Niu , Subhabrata Dutta , Ahmed Elshabrawy , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-22 Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

It can be difficult to autonomously produce driver behavior so that it appears natural to other traffic participants. Through Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), we can automate this process by learning the underlying reward function from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Keuntaek Lee , David Isele , Evangelos A. Theodorou , Sangjae Bae

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is the task of learning a single reward function given a Markov Decision Process (MDP) without defining the reward function, and a set of demonstrations generated by humans/experts. However, in practice,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-18 Siddharthan Rajasekaran , Jinwei Zhang , Jie Fu

The capability of in-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform novel tasks without parameter updates by conditioning on a few input-output examples. However, collecting high-quality examples for new or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Zihan Chen , Song Wang , Xingbo Fu , Chengshuai Shi , Zhenyu Lei , Cong Shen , Jundong Li

In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) is a frontier paradigm to solve Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems in the foundation model era. While ICRL capabilities have been demonstrated in transformers through task-specific training, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Fanzeng Xia , Hao Liu , Yisong Yue , Tongxin Li

In-context learning with large language models (LLMs) excels at adapting to various tasks rapidly. However, its success hinges on carefully selecting demonstrations, which remains an obstacle in practice. Current approaches to this problem…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Shangqing Xu , Chao Zhang

Transformers exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where these models solve new tasks by using examples in the prompt without additional training. In our work, we identify and analyze two key components of ICL: (1) context-scaling, where model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Amirhesam Abedsoltan , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Jingfeng Wu , Mikhail Belkin

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success across multiple domains, including competitive games, natural language processing, and robotics. Despite these advancements, policies trained via DRL often struggle to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 James Chapman , Kedar Karhadkar , Guido Montufar

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling few-shot learning without the need for gradient updates. Despite its advantages, the effectiveness of ICL heavily depends on the choice of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Vinay M. S. , Minh-Hao Van , Xintao Wu

Sequential decision making, commonly formalized as Markov Decision Process (MDP) optimization, is a important challenge in artificial intelligence. Two key approaches to this problem are reinforcement learning (RL) and planning. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Thomas M. Moerland , Joost Broekens , Aske Plaat , Catholijn M. Jonker

Recent studies have shown that Transformers can perform in-context reinforcement learning (RL) by imitating existing RL algorithms, enabling sample-efficient adaptation to unseen tasks without parameter updates. However, these models also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Jaehyeon Son , Soochan Lee , Gunhee Kim

Large Language models (LLMs) have achieved encouraging results in tabular data generation. However, existing approaches require fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive. This paper explores an alternative: prompting a fixed LLM with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Liancheng Fang , Aiwei Liu , Hengrui Zhang , Henry Peng Zou , Weizhi Zhang , Philip S. Yu

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract context from natural language problem descriptions naturally raises questions about their suitability in autonomous decision-making settings. This paper studies the behaviour of these…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Xiao Yang , Juxi Leitner , Michael Burke

Deploying reinforcement learning policies in the real world requires adapting to time-varying environments. We study this problem in the contextual Markov Decision Process (cMDP) framework, where a family of environments is indexed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Param Budhraja , Aditya Gangrade , Alex Olshevsky , Venkatesh Saligrama

In-context learning (ICL) has transformed the use of large language models (LLMs) for NLP tasks, enabling few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples without finetuning. Despite its effectiveness, ICL is prone to errors,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Mario Sanz-Guerrero , Katharina von der Wense

Context, the embedding of previous collected trajectories, is a powerful construct for Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) algorithms. By conditioning on an effective context, Meta-RL policies can easily generalize to new tasks within a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Haotian Fu , Hongyao Tang , Jianye Hao , Chen Chen , Xidong Feng , Dong Li , Wulong Liu