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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

Many recent language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL), manifested in the LMs' ability to perform a new task solely from natural-language instruction. Previous work curating in-context learners assumes that ICL emerges…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Michal Štefánik , Marek Kadlčík , Petr Sojka

In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Aaron Mueller , Albert Webson , Jackson Petty , Tal Linzen

Transformers exhibit in-context learning (ICL): the ability to use novel information presented in the context without additional weight updates. Recent work shows that ICL emerges when models are trained on a sufficiently diverse set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Alex Nguyen , Gautam Reddy

In-context learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a powerful new learning paradigm. However, its underlying mechanism is still not well understood. In particular, it is challenging to map it to the "standard" machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Roee Hendel , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson

Induction heads are attention heads that perform inductive copying by matching patterns from earlier context and copying their continuations verbatim. As models develop induction heads, they experience a sharp drop in training loss, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Kerem Sahin , Sheridan Feucht , Adam Belfki , Jannik Brinkmann , Aaron Mueller , David Bau , Chris Wendler

In-context learning (ICL)-the ability of transformer-based models to perform new tasks from examples provided at inference time-has emerged as a hallmark of modern language models. While recent works have investigated the mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-23 Soham Bonnerjee , Zhen Wei , Yeon , Anna Asch , Sagnik Nandy , Promit Ghosal

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of large pretrained transformers, enabling them to solve new tasks implicit in example input-output pairs without any gradient updates. Despite its practical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Joshua Hill , Benjamin Eyre , Elliot Creager

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

Neural sequence models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) abilities, where they can perform new tasks when prompted with training and test examples, without any parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Yu Bai , Fan Chen , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Song Mei

While large language models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, understandings of such capabilities are still in an early stage, where existing theory and mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Tianyu Guo , Wei Hu , Song Mei , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Silvio Savarese , Yu Bai

We study the in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of pretrained Transformers in the setting of nonlinear regression. Specifically, we focus on a random Transformer with a nonlinear MLP head where the first layer is randomly initialized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-19 Samet Demir , Zafer Dogan

In-context learning (ICL) allows large models to adapt to tasks using a few examples, yet its extension to vision-language models (VLMs) remains fragile. Our analysis reveals that the fundamental limitation lies in an inductive gap, models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoyu Wang , Haonan Wang , Yuyan Chen , Jun Chen , Gang Liu , Qian Wang , Jiahong Yan , Yanghua Xiao

Recent interest has surged in employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for machine translation (MT) via in-context learning (ICL) (Vilar et al., 2023). Most prior studies primarily focus on optimizing translation quality, with limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Pranjal A. Chitale , Jay Gala , Raj Dabre

We investigate whether chemical processes can perform in-context learning (ICL), a mode of computation typically associated with transformer architectures. ICL allows a system to infer task-specific rules from a sequence of examples without…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-01-13 Carlos Floyd , Hector Manuel Lopez Rios , Aaron R. Dinner , Suriyanarayanan Vaikuntanathan

Language models, especially pre-trained large language models, have showcased remarkable abilities as few-shot in-context learners (ICL), adept at adapting to new tasks with just a few demonstrations in the input context. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Man Luo , Xin Xu , Yue Liu , Panupong Pasupat , Mehran Kazemi

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability for large language models (LLMs) to adapt to downstream tasks by leveraging a few (demonstration) examples. Despite its effectiveness, the mechanism behind ICL remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Pengfei He , Yingqian Cui , Han Xu , Hui Liu , Makoto Yamada , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown their effectiveness in multiple complicated natural language reasoning tasks. A key challenge remains in adapting these models efficiently to new or unfamiliar tasks. In-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Siqi Liang , Sumyeong Ahn , Jiayu Zhou

By allowing models to predict without task-specific training, in-context learning (ICL) with pretrained LLMs has enormous potential in NLP. However, a number of problems persist in ICL. In particular, its performance is sensitive to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Zhichao Xu , Daniel Cohen , Bei Wang , Vivek Srikumar

Transformers have demonstrated a strong ability for in-context learning (ICL), enabling models to solve previously unseen tasks using only example input output pairs provided at inference time. While prior theoretical work has established…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rushil Chandrupatla , Leo Bangayan , Sebastian Leng
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