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Related papers: Rethinking Invariance in In-context Learning

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Transformer neural networks can exhibit a surprising capacity for in-context learning (ICL) despite not being explicitly trained for it. Prior work has provided a deeper understanding of how ICL emerges in transformers, e.g. through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Aaditya K. Singh , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Ted Moskovitz , Erin Grant , Andrew M. Saxe , Felix Hill

With in-context learning ability, the performance of large language models can be significantly boosted when provided with appropriate context. However, existing in-context learning methods mainly rely on human-provided contexts, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Jinghan Yang , Shuming Ma , Furu Wei

In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn online from external rewards directly within the context window. However, a central challenge in ICRL is reward estimation, as models typically lack…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Wenxuan Jiang , Yuxin Zuo , Zijian Zhang , Xuecheng Wu , Zining Fan , Wenxuan Liu , Li Chen , Xiaoyu Li , Xuezhi Cao , Xiaolong Jin , Ninghao Liu

Transformers have shown a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), making predictions based on contextual examples. However, while theoretical analyses have explored this prediction capability, the nature of the inferred context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Fei Lu , Yue Yu

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

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities on textual data. We explore whether these capabilities can be extended to continuous vectors from diverse domains, obtained from black-box pretrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yufan Zhuang , Chandan Singh , Liyuan Liu , Jingbo Shang , Jianfeng Gao

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

Recent developments in large pre-trained language models have enabled unprecedented performance on a variety of downstream tasks. Achieving best performance with these models often leverages in-context learning, where a model performs a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Alexander Scarlatos , Andrew Lan

In-context learning (ICL) adapts LLMs by providing demonstrations without fine-tuning the model parameters; however, it does not differentiate between demonstrations and quadratically increases the complexity of Transformer LLMs, exhausting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Giwon Hong , Emile van Krieken , Edoardo Ponti , Nikolay Malkin , Pasquale Minervini

In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-24 Kaito Takanami , Takashi Takahashi , Yoshiyuki Kabashima

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

Real-world applications of large language models (LLMs) in computational social science (CSS) tasks primarily depend on the effectiveness of instruction tuning (IT) or in-context learning (ICL). While IT has shown highly effective at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Taihang Wang , Xiaoman Xu , Yimin Wang , Ye Jiang

Transformer models exhibit in-context learning: the ability to accurately predict the response to a novel query based on illustrative examples in the input sequence. In-context learning contrasts with traditional in-weights learning of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Gautam Reddy

In-context learning (ICL) exhibits dual operating modes: task learning, i.e., acquiring a new skill from in-context samples, and task retrieval, i.e., locating and activating a relevant pretrained skill. Recent theoretical work investigates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Ziqian Lin , Kangwook Lee

Learning invariant representations is a critical first step in a number of machine learning tasks. A common approach corresponds to the so-called information bottleneck principle in which an application dependent function of mutual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Aditya Kumar Akash , Vishnu Suresh Lokhande , Sathya N. Ravi , Vikas Singh

Human learning embodies a striking duality: sometimes, we appear capable of following logical, compositional rules and benefit from structured curricula (e.g., in formal education), while other times, we rely on an incremental approach or…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Jacob Russin , Ellie Pavlick , Michael J. Frank

Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Shohei Taniguchi , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

In-context learning (ICL) is an important capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling these models to dynamically adapt based on specific, in-context exemplars, thereby improving accuracy and relevance. However, LLM's responses may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Tong Wu , Ashwinee Panda , Jiachen T. Wang , Prateek Mittal

We propose In-Context Clustering (ICC), a flexible LLM-based procedure for clustering data from diverse distributions. Unlike traditional clustering algorithms constrained by predefined similarity measures, ICC flexibly captures complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Ying Wang , Mengye Ren , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Contrastive Learning (CL) has been proved to be a powerful self-supervised approach for a wide range of domains, including computer vision and graph representation learning. However, the incremental learning issue of CL has rarely been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Cheng Ji , Jianxin Li , Hao Peng , Jia Wu , Xingcheng Fu , Qingyun Sun , Phillip S. Yu