English
Related papers

Related papers: How Private is Your Attention? Bridging Privacy wi…

200 papers

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Baturay Saglam , Xinyang Hu , Zhuoran Yang , Dionysis Kalogerias , Amin Karbasi

In-context learning (ICL) is a recent advancement in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). This feature allows users to perform a new task without updating the model. Concretely, users can address tasks during the inference time…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Wai Man Si , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang

A private machine learning algorithm hides as much as possible about its training data while still preserving accuracy. In this work, we study whether a non-private learning algorithm can be made private by relying on an instance-encoding…

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

In-context Learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to swiftly adapt to unseen tasks at inference-time by prefixing a few demonstration examples before queries. Despite its versatility, ICL incurs substantial computational and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Zhuowei Li , Zihao Xu , Ligong Han , Yunhe Gao , Song Wen , Di Liu , Hao Wang , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Implicit in-context learning (ICL) has newly emerged as a promising paradigm that simulates ICL behaviors in the representation space of Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to attain few-shot performance at zero-shot cost. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jiaqian Li , Yanshu Li , Ligong Han , Ruixiang Tang , Wenya Wang

Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Ekin Akyürek , Bailin Wang , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for task adaptation in large language models (LLMs), where models infer underlying task structures from a few demonstrations. However, ICL remains susceptible to biases that arise…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Zhihang Tan , Jingrui Hou , Ping Wang , Qibiao Hu , Peng Zhu

Ever since the development of GPT-3 in the natural language processing (NLP) field, in-context learning (ICL) has played an essential role in utilizing large language models (LLMs). By presenting the LM utterance-label demonstrations at the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-18 Ming-Hao Hsu , Kai-Wei Chang , Shang-Wen Li , Hung-yi Lee

As model context lengths continue to increase, the number of demonstrations that can be provided in-context approaches the size of entire training datasets. We study the behavior of in-context learning (ICL) at this extreme scale on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Amanda Bertsch , Maor Ivgi , Emily Xiao , Uri Alon , Jonathan Berant , Matthew R. Gormley , Graham Neubig

While attention-based models have demonstrated the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL), the theoretical understanding of how these models acquired this ability through gradient descent training is still preliminary. Towards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Yedi Zhang , Aaditya K. Singh , Peter E. Latham , Andrew Saxe

Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning (IWL), where memorized information is encoded in model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Suraj Anand , Michael A. Lepori , Jack Merullo , Ellie Pavlick

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

Transformer models exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL), adapting to novel tasks from examples within their context, yet the underlying mechanisms remain largely mysterious. Here, we provide an exact analytical characterization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Nischal Mainali , Lucas Teixeira

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks by prompting them with a sequence of training examples. However, it is known that ICL is very sensitive to the choice of training examples: randomly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Ting-Yun Chang , Robin Jia

Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions. We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Daniel Wurgaft , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Core Francisco Park , Hidenori Tanaka , Gautam Reddy , Noah D. Goodman

In-context learning (ICL) has become a prominent paradigm to rapidly customize LLMs to new tasks without fine-tuning. However, despite the empirical evidence of its usefulness, we still do not truly understand how ICL works. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Harshita Narnoli , Mihai Surdeanu

Accurate uncertainty quantification is crucial for the safe deployment of machine learning models, and prior research has demonstrated improvements in the calibration of modern language models (LMs). We study in-context learning (ICL), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hanlin Zhang , Yi-Fan Zhang , Yaodong Yu , Dhruv Madeka , Dean Foster , Eric Xing , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Sham Kakade

The intriguing in-context learning (ICL) abilities of deep Transformer models have lately garnered significant attention. By studying in-context linear regression on unimodal Gaussian data, recent empirical and theoretical works have argued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

Transformer models have become foundational across a wide range of scientific and engineering domains due to their strong empirical performance. A key capability underlying their success is in-context learning (ICL): when presented with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Zhen Qin , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu