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Related papers: Analyzing limits for in-context learning

200 papers

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their…

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

Sequence modelling requires determining which past tokens are causally relevant from the context and their importance: a process inherent to the attention layers in transformers, yet whose underlying learned mechanisms remain poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Francesco D'Angelo , Nicolas Flammarion

Search is an ability foundational in many important tasks, and recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) struggle to perform search robustly. It is unknown whether this inability is due to a lack of data, insufficient…

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

Composing basic skills from simple tasks to accomplish composite tasks is crucial for modern intelligent systems. We investigate the in-context composition ability of language models to perform composite tasks that combine basic skills…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Zidong Liu , Zhuoyan Xu , Zhenmei Shi , Yingyu Liang

One of the most striking features of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their ability to learn in-context. Namely at inference time an LLM is able to learn new patterns without any additional weight update when these patterns are presented in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Benoit Dherin , Michael Munn , Hanna Mazzawi , Michael Wunder , Javier Gonzalvo

While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable successes in several domains, its real-world application is limited due to many methods failing to generalise to unfamiliar conditions. In this work, we consider the problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Michael Beukman , Devon Jarvis , Richard Klein , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

A common assumption about neural networks is that they can learn an appropriate internal representations on their own, see e.g. end-to-end learning. In this work we challenge this assumption. We consider two simple tasks and show that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Krisztian Buza

The success of deep learning-based limit order book forecasting models is highly dependent on the quality and the robustness of the input data representation. A significant body of the quantitative finance literature focuses on utilising…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2022-12-08 Yufei Wu , Mahmoud Mahfouz , Daniele Magazzeni , Manuela Veloso

In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models becomes available over time. Unfortunately, these models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Beyza Ermis , Giovanni Zappella , Martin Wistuba , Aditya Rawal , Cedric Archambeau

This study aims to understand how statistical biases affect the model's ability to generalize to in-distribution and out-of-distribution data on algorithmic tasks. Prior research indicates that transformers may inadvertently learn to rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 John Mitros

Transformer-based language models are architecturally constrained to process text of a fixed maximum length. Essays written by higher-grade students frequently exceed the maximum allowed length for many popular open-source models. A common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Christopher Ormerod , Gitit Kehat

Multi-modal contrastive learning techniques in the audio-text domain have quickly become a highly active area of research. Most works are evaluated with standard audio retrieval and classification benchmarks assuming that (i) these models…

Sound · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Ho-Hsiang Wu , Oriol Nieto , Juan Pablo Bello , Justin Salamon

Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based models in various real-world tasks, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent studies have suggested that transformers can implement gradient descent as an in-context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Xingwu Chen , Lei Zhao , Difan Zou

Large transformer models pretrained on offline reinforcement learning datasets have demonstrated remarkable in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) capabilities, where they can make good decisions when prompted with interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Licong Lin , Yu Bai , Song Mei

At present, the mechanisms of in-context learning in Transformers are not well understood and remain mostly an intuition. In this paper, we suggest that training Transformers on auto-regressive objectives is closely related to…

The ability to accurately predict the surrounding environment is a foundational principle of intelligence in biological and artificial agents. In recent years, a variety of approaches have been proposed for learning to predict the physical…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-08-01 Alberto Cenzato , Alberto Testolin , Marco Zorzi

Language models are generally trained on short, truncated input sequences, which limits their ability to use discourse-level information present in long-range context to improve their predictions. Recent efforts to improve the efficiency of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Simeng Sun , Kalpesh Krishna , Andrew Mattarella-Micke , Mohit Iyyer

Many tasks can be composed from a few independent components. This gives rise to a combinatorial explosion of possible tasks, only some of which might be encountered during training. Under what circumstances can transformers compositionally…

Large language models exhibit sophisticated capabilities, yet understanding how they work internally remains a central challenge. A fundamental obstacle is that training selects for behavior, not circuitry, so many weight configurations can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Joshua S. Schiffman