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In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to solve novel tasks without weight updates. Despite its empirical success, the mechanism behind ICL remains poorly understood, limiting our ability to interpret, improve, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Chengye Li , Haiyun Liu , Yuanxi Li

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

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

With the increasing ability of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has evolved as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where instead of fine-tuning the parameters of an LLM specific to a downstream task…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Andrew Parry , Debasis Ganguly , Manish Chandra

Large language models (LLMs) have shown the emergent capability of in-context learning (ICL). One line of research has claimed that ICL is functionally equivalent to gradient descent, a type of error-driven learning mechanism. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Zhenghao Zhou , Robert Frank , R. Thomas McCoy

In-context learning (ICL) is a valuable capability exhibited by Transformers pretrained on diverse sequence tasks. However, previous studies have observed that ICL often conflicts with the model's inherent in-weight learning (IWL) ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Guanyu Chen , Ruichen Wang , Tianren Zhang , Feng Chen

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

In-context learning (ICL) is a hallmark capability of transformers, through which trained models learn to adapt to new tasks by leveraging information from the input context. Prior work has shown that ICL emerges in transformers due to the…

The transformer's remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) has sparked a wide range of studies designed to understand its strengths and limitations. However, a theoretical understanding of when ICL can and cannot generalize…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-30 Soo Min Kwon , Alec S. Xu , Can Yaras , Laura Balzano , Qing Qu

Large language models (LLM) have recently shown the extraordinary ability to perform unseen tasks based on few-shot examples provided as text, also known as in-context learning (ICL). While recent works have attempted to understand the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Harmon Bhasin , Timothy Ossowski , Yiqiao Zhong , Junjie Hu

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful technique for getting language models to perform complex tasks with no training updates. Prior work has established strong correlations between the number of in-context examples provided and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Aryaman Arora , Dan Jurafsky , Christopher Potts , Noah D. Goodman

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

We formalize a new concept for LLMs, context-enhanced learning. It involves standard gradient-based learning on text except that the context is enhanced with additional data on which no auto-regressive gradients are computed. This setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xingyu Zhu , Abhishek Panigrahi , Sanjeev Arora

In-context learning (ICL) has proven to be a significant capability with the advancement of Large Language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks without…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Quanyu Long , Jianda Chen , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

Shortcut learning refers to the phenomenon where models employ simple, non-robust decision rules in practical tasks, which hinders their generalization and robustness. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) in recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Rui Song , Yingji Li , Lida Shi , Fausto Giunchiglia , Hao Xu

Test-time training (TTT) enhances model performance by explicitly updating designated parameters prior to each prediction to adapt to the test data. While TTT has demonstrated considerable empirical success, its theoretical underpinnings…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Kento Kuwataka , Taiji Suzuki

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) and Instruction Tuning (IT) are two primary paradigms of adopting Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream applications. However, they are significantly different. In ICL, a set of demonstrations are provided at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-20 Hanyu Duan , Yixuan Tang , Yi Yang , Ahmed Abbasi , Kar Yan Tam

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) refers to the ability of RL agents to adapt to new tasks at inference time without parameter updates by conditioning on additional context. Recent empirical studies further demonstrate that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

Language models, especially pre-trained large language models, have showcased remarkable abilities as few-shot in-context learners (ICL), adept at adapting to new tasks with just a few demonstrations in the input context. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Man Luo , Xin Xu , Yue Liu , Panupong Pasupat , Mehran Kazemi