Related papers: Next-token pretraining implies in-context learning

With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It…

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…

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…

The predictions of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks often improve significantly when including examples of the input--label relationship in the context. However, there is currently no consensus about how this in-context…

In-Context Learning (ICL) has significantly expanded the general-purpose nature of large language models, allowing them to adapt to novel tasks using merely the inputted context. This has motivated a series of papers that analyze tractable…

In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…

This thesis investigates two key phenomena in large language models (LLMs): in-context learning (ICL) and model collapse. We study ICL in a linear transformer with tied weights trained on linear regression tasks, and show that minimising…

In-context learning, where pre-trained language models learn to perform tasks from task examples and instructions in their contexts, has attracted much attention in the NLP community. However, the ability of in-context learning is not fully…

In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful ability that emerges in transformer models, enabling them to learn from context without weight updates. Recent work has established emergent ICL as a transient phenomenon that can sometimes disappear…

In-context learning (ICL) of large language models has proven to be a surprisingly effective method of learning a new task from only a few demonstrative examples. In this paper, we study the efficacy of ICL from the viewpoint of statistical…

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…

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…

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…

We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

A striking property of transformers is their ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), a machine learning framework in which the learner is presented with a novel context during inference implicitly through some data, and tasked with…

The emergence of In-Context Learning (ICL) in LLMs remains a remarkable phenomenon that is partially understood. To explain ICL, recent studies have created theoretical connections to Gradient Descent (GD). We ask, do such connections hold…

Large language models (LLMs) exploit in-context learning (ICL) to solve tasks with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not yet well-understood. Some works suggest that LLMs only recall already learned concepts from…

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for natural language processing. Part of their success is owed to a remarkable capability known as in-context learning (ICL): they can acquire and apply novel associations solely from their…

This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates…