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Large language models (LLMs) increasingly assist software engineering tasks that require reasoning over long code contexts, yet their robustness under varying input conditions remains unclear. We conduct a systematic study of long-context…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Kishan Maharaj , Nandakishore Menon , Ashita Saxena , Srikanth Tamilselvam

Although transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities for in-context learning (ICL) in practice, theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanism that allows transformers to perform ICL is still in its infancy. This work aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Shen , Ruida Zhou , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

This study introduces a hypothesis-testing framework to assess whether large language models (LLMs) possess genuine reasoning abilities or primarily depend on token bias. We go beyond evaluating LLMs on accuracy; rather, we aim to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Bowen Jiang , Yangxinyu Xie , Zhuoqun Hao , Xiaomeng Wang , Tanwi Mallick , Weijie J. Su , Camillo J. Taylor , Dan Roth

Large language models (LLMs) like transformers demonstrate impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, allowing them to make predictions for new tasks based on prompt exemplars without parameter updates. While existing ICL theories…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Kevin Christian Wibisono , Yixin Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language processing, and a precise understanding of the internal mechanisms driving their success is essential. In this work, we analyze the trajectories of token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Murdock Aubry , Haoming Meng , Anton Sugolov , Vardan Papyan

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

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

In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Kartik Ahuja , David Lopez-Paz

Large language models are able to learn new tasks in context, where they are provided with instructions and a few annotated examples. However, the effectiveness of in-context learning is dependent on the provided context, and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Afra Amini , Massimiliano Ciaramita

Transformers have demonstrated a strong ability for in-context learning (ICL), enabling models to solve previously unseen tasks using only example input output pairs provided at inference time. While prior theoretical work has established…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rushil Chandrupatla , Leo Bangayan , Sebastian Leng

In-Context Learning (ICL) has been a powerful emergent property of large language models that has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In contrast to regular gradient-based learning, ICL is highly interpretable and does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Brian K Chen , Tianyang Hu , Hui Jin , Hwee Kuan Lee , Kenji Kawaguchi

This paper explores the robustness of language models (LMs) to variations in the temporal context within factual knowledge. It examines whether LMs can correctly associate a temporal context with a past fact valid over a defined period, by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Hichem Ammar Khodja , Frédéric Béchet , Quentin Brabant , Alexis Nasr , Gwénolé Lecorvé

Transformers are deep architectures that define "in-context mappings" which enable predicting new tokens based on a given set of tokens (such as a prompt in NLP applications or a set of patches for a vision transformer). In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Takashi Furuya , Maarten V. de Hoop , Gabriel Peyré

The emergent few-shot reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have excited the natural language and machine learning community over recent years. Despite of numerous successful applications, the underlying mechanism of such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Xiaojuan Tang , Zilong Zheng , Jiaqi Li , Fanxu Meng , Song-Chun Zhu , Yitao Liang , Muhan Zhang

Previous work has showcased the intriguing capability of large language models (LLMs) in retrieving facts and processing context knowledge. However, only limited research exists on the layer-wise capability of LLMs to encode knowledge,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Tianjie Ju , Weiwei Sun , Wei Du , Xinwei Yuan , Zhaochun Ren , Gongshen Liu

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a successful paradigm for leveraging large language models (LLMs). However, it often struggles to generalize beyond the distribution of the provided demonstrations. A recent advancement in enhancing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Ukyo Honda , Tatsushi Oka

Autoregressive Transformers adopted in Large Language Models (LLMs) are hard to scale to long sequences. Despite several works trying to reduce their computational cost, most of LLMs still adopt attention layers between all pairs of tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Sotiris Anagnostidis , Dario Pavllo , Luca Biggio , Lorenzo Noci , Aurelien Lucchi , Thomas Hofmann

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. Despite extensive empirical studies, a principled understanding of ICL emergence at scale remains more elusive. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sushant Mehta , Ishan Gupta

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with long-horizon tasks due to the "context bottleneck" and the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where accumulated noise from verbose environments degrades reasoning over multi-turn interactions. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xiaozhe Li , Tianyi Lyu , Yizhao Yang , Liang Shan , Siyi Yang , Ligao Zhang , Zhuoyi Huang , Qingwen Liu , Yang Li

Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Eric J. Bigelow , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka , Tomer D. Ullman