Related papers: Next-token pretraining implies in-context learning
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…
Despite the surprising few-shot performance of in-context learning (ICL), it is still a common practice to randomly sample examples to serve as context. This paper advocates a new principle for ICL: self-adaptive in-context learning. The…
Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few…
In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…
In this work, we explore the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks that were not encountered during training. To achieve this, we conduct synthetic experiments where the objective is to learn OOD…
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…
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…
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…
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},…
Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…
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…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, adapting to new tasks by simply conditioning on demonstrations without parameter updates. Compelling empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that ICL, as…
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…
The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…
In-context learning is a surprising and important phenomenon that emerged when modern language models were scaled to billions of learned parameters. Without modifying a large language model's weights, it can be tuned to perform various…
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…
In-context learning is a powerful capability of certain machine learning models that arguably underpins the success of today's frontier AI models. However, in-context learning is critically limited to settings where the in-context…
In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to acquire new behaviors from the input sequence alone without any parameter updates. Recent studies have shown that ICL can surpass the original meaning learned in pretraining…
Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…
In-context learning (ICL) allows transformer-based language models that are pre-trained on general text to quickly learn a specific task with a few "task demonstrations" without updating their parameters, significantly boosting their…