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Do large language models (LLMs) represent concepts abstractly, i.e., independent of input format? We revisit Function Vectors (FVs), compact representations of in-context learning (ICL) tasks that causally drive task performance. Across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Gustaw Opiełka , Hannes Rosenbusch , Claire E. Stevenson

We report the presence of a simple neural mechanism that represents an input-output function as a vector within autoregressive transformer language models (LMs). Using causal mediation analysis on a diverse range of in-context-learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Eric Todd , Millicent L. Li , Arnab Sen Sharma , Aaron Mueller , Byron C. Wallace , David Bau

Task vectors offer a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Yuxin Dong , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu , Xia Ning

One of the most common complaints about large language models (LLMs) is their prompt sensitivity -- that is, the fact that their ability to perform a task or provide a correct answer to a question can depend unpredictably on the way the…

In-context learning (ICL) excels at new tasks from minimal examples, yet we still lack a mechanistic explanation of how few-shot prompts shape a model's function vector (FV)--a causal activation direction that drives task behavior on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Entang Wang , Yiwei Wang , Aleksandra Bakalova , Michael Hahn

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities from few-shot demonstration exemplars. While recent learning-based demonstration selection methods have proven beneficial to ICL by choosing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Hui Liu , Wenya Wang , Hao Sun , Chris Xing Tian , Chenqi Kong , Xin Dong , Haoliang Li

A key objective of interpretability research on large language models (LLMs) is to develop methods for robustly steering models toward desired behaviors. To this end, two distinct approaches to interpretability -- ``bottom-up" and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Madeline Brumley , Joe Kwon , David Krueger , Dmitrii Krasheninnikov , Usman Anwar

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

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations in the prompt. Two different mechanisms have been proposed to explain ICL: induction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kayo Yin , Jacob Steinhardt

Modern language models (LMs) can learn to perform new tasks in different ways: in instruction following, the target task is described explicitly in natural language; in few-shot prompting, the task is specified implicitly with a small…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Emmy Liu , Graham Neubig , Jacob Andreas

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly being regarded as foundation models that can be instructed to solve diverse tasks by prompting, without task-specific training. We examine the seemingly obvious question: how to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Niccolo Avogaro , Thomas Frick , Mattia Rigotti , Andrea Bartezzaghi , Filip Janicki , Cristiano Malossi , Konrad Schindler , Roy Assaf

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities, one of the most important being in-context learning (ICL). With ICL, LLMs can derive the underlying rule from a few demonstrations and provide answers that comply with the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bowen Zheng , Ming Ma , Zhongqiao Lin , Tianming Yang

Modern large language models (LLMs) are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Unlike traditional learners, LLMs cannot use back-propagation to obtain feedback, and condition…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Adrian de Wynter , Xun Wang , Qilong Gu , Si-Qing Chen

Prompt tuning is an efficient solution for training large language models (LLMs). However, current soft-prompt-based methods often sacrifice multi-task modularity, requiring the training process to be fully or partially repeated for each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Robert Belanec , Simon Ostermann , Ivan Srba , Maria Bielikova

Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform new tasks from in-context demonstrations, a phenomenon known as in-context learning (ICL). Recent work suggests that these demonstrations are compressed into task vectors (TVs), compact task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haolin Yang , Hakaze Cho , Kaize Ding , Naoya Inoue

Decoder-only language models have the ability to dynamically switch between various computational tasks based on input prompts. Despite many successful applications of prompting, there is very limited understanding of the internal mechanism…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Artem Kirsanov , Chi-Ning Chou , Kyunghyun Cho , SueYeon Chung

Autoregressive vision-language models (VLMs) can handle many tasks within a single model, yet the representations that enable this capability remain opaque. We find that VLMs align conceptually equivalent inputs into a shared task vector,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Grace Luo , Trevor Darrell , Amir Bar

In large language models (LLM), in-context learning (ICL) refers to performing new tasks by conditioning on small demonstrations provided in the input context. Recent advances in visual in-context learning (VICL) demonstrate promising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Shao-Jun Xia , Huixin Zhang , Zhengzhong Tu

Large language models (LLMs) often map semantically related prompts to similar internal representations at specific layers, even when their surface forms differ widely. We show that this behavior can be explained through Iterated Function…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Sotirios Panagiotis Chytas , Vikas Singh

Motivated by in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), multimodal LLMs with additional visual modality are also exhibited with similar ICL abilities when multiple image-text pairs are provided as…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Nan Xu , Fei Wang , Sheng Zhang , Hoifung Poon , Muhao Chen
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