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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning and prediction across different domains. Yet, their ability to infer temporal regularities from structured behavioral data remains underexplored. This paper…

In-context learning, where pre-trained language models learn to perform tasks from task examples and instructions in their contexts, has attracted much attention in the NLP community. However, the ability of in-context learning is not fully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Minlie Huang

State of the art foundation models such as GPT-4 perform surprisingly well at in-context learning (ICL), a variant of meta-learning concerning the learned ability to solve tasks during a neural network forward pass, exploiting contextual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Riccardo Grazzi , Julien Siems , Simon Schrodi , Thomas Brox , Frank Hutter

In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we study the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-03 Juno Kim , Tai Nakamaki , Taiji Suzuki

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

One of the most popular methods for context-aware machine translation (MT) is to use separate encoders for the source sentence and context as multiple sources for one target sentence. Recent work has cast doubt on whether these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-28 Matīss Rikters , Toshiaki Nakazawa

What factors contribute to the relative success and corresponding difficulties of in-context learning for Large Language Models (LLMs)? Drawing on insights from the literature on human concept learning, we test LLMs on carefully designed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Leroy Z. Wang , R. Thomas McCoy , Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed NLP with their remarkable In-context Learning (ICL) capabilities. Automated assistants based on LLMs are gaining popularity; however, adapting them to novel tasks is still challenging. While…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Anwoy Chatterjee , Eshaan Tanwar , Subhabrata Dutta , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Pre-trained large language models have demonstrated a strong ability to learn from context, known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite a surge of recent applications that leverage such capabilities, it is by no means clear, at least…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Bingqing Song , Jiaxiang Li , Rong Wang , Songtao Lu , Mingyi Hong

We investigate the mechanisms that arise when transformers are trained to solve arithmetic on sequences where tokens are variables whose meaning is determined only through their interactions in-context. While prior work has studied…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Eric Todd , Jannik Brinkmann , Rohit Gandikota , David Bau

Nobody knows how language works, but many theories abound. Transformers are a class of neural networks that process language automatically with more success than alternatives, both those based on neural computations and those that rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Felix Hill

Task vectors offer a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Yuxin Dong , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu , Xia Ning

Over the past few years, the abilities of large language models (LLMs) have received extensive attention, which have performed exceptionally well in complicated scenarios such as logical reasoning and symbolic inference. A significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Junbing Yan , Chengyu Wang , Jun Huang , Wei Zhang

Many neural network architectures are known to be Turing Complete, and can thus, in principle implement arbitrary algorithms. However, Transformers are unique in that they can implement gradient-based learning algorithms under simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Xiang Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Suvrit Sra

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to solve complex tasks through In-Context Learning (ICL), where models learn from a few input-output pairs without explicit fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore the capacity of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Paimon Goulart , Evangelos E. Papalexakis

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Sewon Min , Xinxi Lyu , Ari Holtzman , Mikel Artetxe , Mike Lewis , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Luke Zettlemoyer

The capabilities of transformer networks such as ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have captured the world's attention. The crucial computational mechanism underlying their performance relies on transforming a complete input…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Lyle Muller , Patricia S. Churchland , Terrence J. Sejnowski

One of the theoretical pillars that sustain certain machine learning models are universal approximation theorems, which prove that they can approximate all functions from a function class to arbitrary precision. Independently, classical…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-28 Tobias Reinhart , Gemma De les Coves

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a strong capacity for in-context learning: Given labeled examples, they can generate good predictions without parameter updates. However, many interactive settings go beyond static prediction to online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Emile Anand , Abdullah Ateyeh , Xinyuan Cao , Max Dabagia

We study theoretical guarantees for solving linear systems in-context using a linear transformer architecture. For in-domain generalization, we provide neural scaling laws that bound the generalization error in terms of the number of tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Frank Cole , Yulong Lu , Wuzhe Xu , Tianhao Zhang