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In-context learning (ICL) has shown impressive results in few-shot learning tasks, yet its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. A recent line of work suggests that ICL performs gradient descent (GD)-based optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Gilad Deutch , Nadav Magar , Tomer Bar Natan , Guy Dar

In-context learning (ICL) allows LLMs to learn from examples without changing their weights: this is a particularly promising capability for long-context LLMs that can potentially learn from many examples. Recently, Lin et al. (2024)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Hao Zhao , Maksym Andriushchenko , Francesco Croce , Nicolas Flammarion

Instruction following is a critical ability for Large Language Models to perform downstream tasks. The standard approach to instruction tuning has relied on a specific phase of supervised fine-tuning over curated instruction datasets,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-01 David Ponce , Thierry Etchegoyhen

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning (ICL), a supervised learning technique that relies on adding annotated examples to the model context. We investigate a contextual bandit version of in-context reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Giovanni Monea , Antoine Bosselut , Kianté Brantley , Yoav Artzi

In-context learning (ICL), which promotes inference with several demonstrations, has become a widespread paradigm to stimulate LLM capabilities for downstream tasks. Due to context length constraints, it cannot be further improved in spite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jiahao Li , Quan Wang , Licheng Zhang , Guoqing Jin , Zhendong Mao

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL), where learning a new task from just a few training examples is done without being explicitly pre-trained. However, despite the success of LLMs, there…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Xindi Wang , Yufei Wang , Can Xu , Xiubo Geng , Bowen Zhang , Chongyang Tao , Frank Rudzicz , Robert E. Mercer , Daxin Jiang

In-context learning (ICL) describes a language model's ability to generate outputs based on a set of input demonstrations and a subsequent query. To understand this remarkable capability, researchers have studied simplified, stylized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Jaeyeon Kim , Sehyun Kwon , Joo Young Choi , Jongho Park , Jaewoong Cho , Jason D. Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

We study in-context learning (ICL) of linear regression in a deep linear self-attention model, characterizing how performance depends on various computational and statistical resources (width, depth, number of training steps, batch size and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-02 Blake Bordelon , Mary I. Letey , Cengiz Pehlevan

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understandably, a swath of research has been dedicated to uncovering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Jiaoda Li , Yifan Hou , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

Traditionally, neural network training has been primarily viewed as an approximation of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). This interpretation originated in a time when training for multiple epochs on small datasets was common and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Samuel Müller , Noah Hollmann , Frank Hutter

Understanding in-context learning (ICL) capability that enables large language models (LLMs) to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples is of utmost importance. This importance stems not only from the better utilization of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yuxiang Zhou , Jiazheng Li , Yanzheng Xiang , Hanqi Yan , Lin Gui , Yulan He

Transformer-based language models excel at in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to new tasks based on contextual examples, without parameter updates. In a specific form of ICL, which we refer to as \textit{contextual recall},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Bhavya Vasudeva , Puneesh Deora , Alberto Bietti , Vatsal Sharan , Christos Thrampoulidis

Transformers have become a standard architecture in machine learning, demonstrating strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities that allow them to learn from the prompt at inference time. However, uncertainty quantification for ICL remains…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-23 Zhe Huang , Simone Rossi , Rui Yuan , Thomas Hannagan

In-context learning (ICL) is often motivated by the intuition that demonstrations help because they provide correct input-output examples. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: correctness does not guarantee exemplar utility,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Chenghao Qiu , Chunli Peng , Yufeng Yang , Kuan-Hao Huang , Yi Zhou

Despite the surprising few-shot performance of in-context learning (ICL), it is still a common practice to randomly sample examples to serve as context. This paper advocates a new principle for ICL: self-adaptive in-context learning. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Zhiyong Wu , Yaoxiang Wang , Jiacheng Ye , Lingpeng Kong

For question-answering (QA) tasks, in-context learning (ICL) enables language models to generate responses without modifying their parameters by leveraging examples provided in the input. However, the effectiveness of ICL heavily depends on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Ruhan Wang , Zhiyong Wang , Chengkai Huang , Rui Wang , Tong Yu , Lina Yao , John C. S. Lui , Dongruo Zhou

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a phenomenon where task learning occurs through a prompt sequence without the necessity of parameter updates. ICL in Multi-Headed Attention (MHA) with absolute positional embedding has been the focus of more…

In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn tasks from demonstration examples without parameter updates. Although it has been extensively studied in LLMs, its effectiveness in Vision-Language Models (VLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Gabriel O. dos Santos , Esther Colombini , Sandra Avila

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Liuwang Kang , Fan Wang , Shaoshan Liu , Hung-Chyun Chou , Chuan Lin , Ning Ding

In-context learning (ICL) enables transformers to adapt to new tasks through contextual examples without parameter updates. While existing research has typically studied ICL in fixed-complexity environments, practical language models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Puneesh Deora , Bhavya Vasudeva , Tina Behnia , Christos Thrampoulidis