English
Related papers

Related papers: When can in-context learning generalize out of tas…

200 papers

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, 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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Minlie Huang

Large language models have the ability to generate text that mimics patterns in their inputs. We introduce a simple Markov Chain sequence modeling task in order to study how this in-context learning (ICL) capability emerges. In our setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Benjamin L. Edelman , Ezra Edelman , Surbhi Goel , Eran Malach , Nikolaos Tsilivis

In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a pivotal capability of auto-regressive large language models, yet it is hindered by a notable sensitivity to the ordering of context examples regardless of their mutual independence. To address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Lizhe Fang , Yifei Wang , Khashayar Gatmiry , Lei Fang , Yisen Wang

Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities, but the mechanisms underlying relational reasoning remain poorly understood. We investigate how transformers perform \textit{transitive inference}, a classic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jesse Geerts , Andrew Liu , Stephanie Chan , Claudia Clopath , Kimberly Stachenfeld

It has recently been demonstrated empirically that in-context learning emerges in transformers when certain distributional properties are present in the training data, but this ability can also diminish upon further training. We provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Bryan Chan , Xinyi Chen , András György , Dale Schuurmans

In-context learning refers to the ability of a model to condition on a prompt sequence consisting of in-context examples (input-output pairs corresponding to some task) along with a new query input, and generate the corresponding output.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Shivam Garg , Dimitris Tsipras , Percy Liang , Gregory Valiant

We investigate the mechanistic underpinnings of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models by reconciling two dominant perspectives: the component-level analysis of attention heads and the holistic decomposition of ICL into Task…

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

While in-context learning (ICL) has achieved remarkable success in natural language and vision domains, its theoretical understanding-particularly in the context of structured geometric data-remains unexplored. This paper initiates a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhaiming Shen , Alexander Hsu , Rongjie Lai , Wenjing Liao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yongyi Yang , Hidenori Tanaka , Wei Hu

The emergent ability of Large Language Models to use a small number of examples to learn to perform in novel domains and tasks, also called in-context learning (ICL). In this work, we show that a much smaller model can be trained to perform…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Raphael Reinauer , Patrick Simianer , Kaden Uhlig , Johannes E. M. Mosig , Joern Wuebker

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

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

We perform in-depth evaluations of in-context learning (ICL) on state-of-the-art transformer, state-space, and hybrid large language models over two categories of knowledge-based ICL tasks. Using a combination of behavioral probing and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Shenran Wang , Timothy Tin-Long Tse , Jian Zhu

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable flexibility: they can adapt to novel tasks from in-context examples without any parameter updates, a capability known as in-context learning (ICL). Prior work on synthetic tasks has shown that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hua-Dong Xiong , Li Ji-An , Robert C. Wilson , Kwonjoon Lee , Xue-Xin Wei

In-context learning (ICL) is an important yet not fully understood ability of pre-trained large language models (LLMs). It can greatly enhance task performance using a few examples, termed demonstrations, without fine-tuning. Although…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Do Xuan Long , Duong Ngoc Yen , Do Xuan Trong , Luu Anh Tuan , Kenji Kawaguchi , Shafiq Joty , Min-Yen Kan , Nancy F. Chen

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) as it empowers them to comprehend and reason across interconnected inputs. Evaluating the ICL ability of LLMs can enhance their utilization and deepen our…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Wentong Chen , Yankai Lin , ZhenHao Zhou , HongYun Huang , Yantao Jia , Zhao Cao , Ji-Rong Wen

In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 William L. Tong , Cengiz Pehlevan

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Noam Wies , Yoav Levine , Amnon Shashua

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Andrew Parry , Debasis Ganguly , Manish Chandra