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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

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Madhur Panwar , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformer-based architectures, have been recently shown to have the capacity to carry out in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a decision on a new input is made via a direct mapping of the input…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Matteo Zecchin , Kai Yu , Osvaldo Simeone

Selecting or designing an appropriate domain adaptation algorithm for a given problem remains challenging. This paper presents a Transformer model that can provably approximate and opt for domain adaptation methods for a given dataset in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Ryuichiro Hataya , Kota Matsui , Masaaki Imaizumi

Large language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning, where they learn to solve tasks given a few examples. Recent work has shown that transformers can be trained to perform simple regression tasks in-context. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Hrayr Harutyunyan , Rafayel Darbinyan , Samvel Karapetyan , Hrant Khachatrian

Much theoretical work has described the ability of transformers to represent formal languages. However, linking theoretical results to empirical performance is not straightforward due to the complex interplay between the architecture, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Anej Svete , Nadav Borenstein , Mike Zhou , Isabelle Augenstein , Ryan Cotterell

Training autonomous agents that can learn new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations is a long-standing problem in machine learning. Recently, transformers have been shown to learn new language or vision tasks without any weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Sharath Chandra Raparthy , Eric Hambro , Robert Kirk , Mikael Henaff , Roberta Raileanu

An intriguing property of the Transformer is its ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), where the Transformer can solve different inference tasks without parameter updating based on the contextual information provided by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Renpu Liu , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yingcong Li , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

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

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

Meta-learning seeks to build algorithms that rapidly learn how to solve new learning problems based on previous experience. In this paper we investigate meta-learning in the setting of stochastic linear bandit tasks. We assume that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Leonardo Cella , Karim Lounici , Massimiliano Pontil

In the context of classification problems, Deep Learning (DL) approaches represent state of art. Many DL approaches are based on variations of standard multi-layer feed-forward neural networks. These are also referred to as deep networks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Andrea Apicella , Francesco Isgrò , Roberto Prevete

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for natural language processing. Part of their success is owed to a remarkable capability known as in-context learning (ICL): they can acquire and apply novel associations solely from their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Tiberiu Musat , Tiago Pimentel , Lorenzo Noci , Alessandro Stolfo , Mrinmaya Sachan , Thomas Hofmann

Transformer-based models demonstrate a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to unseen tasks from a few prompt examples without parameter updates. Recent research has illuminated how Transformers perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Haoyuan Sun , Ali Jadbabaie , Navid Azizan

Transformers deliver outstanding performance across a wide range of tasks and are now a dominant backbone architecture for large language models (LLMs). Their task-solving performance is improved by increasing parameter size, as shown in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Hidetaka Kamigaito , Ying Zhang , Jingun Kwon , Katsuhiko Hayashi , Manabu Okumura , Taro Watanabe

Motivated by empirical observations of prolonged plateaus and stage-wise progression during training, we investigate the loss landscape of transformer models trained on in-context next-token prediction tasks. In particular, we focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Aditya Varre , Gizem Yüce , Nicolas Flammarion

Large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstrations provided at inference time. We study this in-context learning phenomenon through the lens of Gaussian Processes (GPs). We build controlled experiments where models observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Elif Akata , Konstantinos Voudouris , Vincent Fortuin , Eric Schulz

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful models that can learn concepts at the inference stage via in-context learning (ICL). While theoretical studies, e.g., \cite{zhang2023trained}, attempt to explain the mechanism of ICL, they assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yue Xing , Xiaofeng Lin , Chenheng Xu , Namjoon Suh , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

Large transformer-based models are able to perform in-context few-shot learning, without being explicitly trained for it. This observation raises the question: what aspects of the training regime lead to this emergent behavior? Here, we…