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Understanding the internal mechanisms of GPT-style transformers, particularly their capacity to perform in-context learning (ICL), is critical for advancing AI alignment and interpretability. In-context learning allows transformers to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Samarth Bhargav , Alexander Gu

We investigate the transformer's capability to simulate the training process of deep models via in-context learning (ICL), i.e., in-context deep learning. Our key contribution is providing a positive example of using a transformer to train…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Weimin Wu , Maojiang Su , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Zhao Song , Han Liu

Large transformer-based models are able to perform in-context few-shot learning, without being explicitly trained for it. This observation raises the question: what aspects of the training regime lead to this emergent behavior? Here, we…

In-context learning (ICL), teaching a large language model (LLM) to perform a task with few-shot demonstrations rather than adjusting the model parameters, has emerged as a strong paradigm for using LLMs. While early studies primarily used…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Man Luo , Xin Xu , Zhuyun Dai , Panupong Pasupat , Mehran Kazemi , Chitta Baral , Vaiva Imbrasaite , Vincent Y Zhao

In-context learning (ICL) empowers generative models to address new tasks effectively and efficiently on the fly, without relying on any artificially crafted optimization techniques. In this paper, we study extending ICL to address a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Fan Wang , Chuan Lin , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Amanda Bertsch , Maor Ivgi , Emily Xiao , Uri Alon , Jonathan Berant , Matthew R. Gormley , Graham Neubig

In this work, we introduce a novel paradigm for generalized In-Context Learning (ICL), termed Indirect In-Context Learning. In Indirect ICL, we explore demonstration selection strategies tailored for two distinct real-world scenarios:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Hadi Askari , Shivanshu Gupta , Terry Tong , Fei Wang , Anshuman Chhabra , Muhao Chen

Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for AI, with the key ability of in-context learning (ICL), where they can perform well on unseen tasks based on a brief series of task examples without necessitating any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Zhenmei Shi , Junyi Wei , Zhuoyan Xu , Yingyu Liang

Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

In-context learning (ICL) research often considers learning a function in-context through a uniform sample of input-output pairs. Here, we investigate how presenting a compositional subtask curriculum in context may alter the computations a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Jin Hwa Lee , Andrew K. Lampinen , Aaditya K. Singh , Andrew M. Saxe

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL): they can adapt to a task with only a few examples given in the prompt without any parameter update. However, it is unclear where this capability comes from as there…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Yanda Chen , Chen Zhao , Zhou Yu , Kathleen McKeown , He He

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the process of adding a small number of localized examples from a training set of labelled data to an LLM's prompt with an objective to effectively control the generative process seeking to improve the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Manish Chandra , Debasis Ganguly , Iadh Ounis

We investigate in-context learning (ICL) through a meticulous experimental framework that systematically varies task complexity and model architecture. Extending beyond the linear regression baseline, we introduce Gaussian kernel regression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Binwen Liu , Peiyu Xu , Quan Yuan , Yihong Chen

In-context learning (ICL) enables transformers to adapt to new tasks through contextual examples without parameter updates. While existing research has typically studied ICL in fixed-complexity environments, practical language models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Puneesh Deora , Bhavya Vasudeva , Tina Behnia , Christos Thrampoulidis

In-context learning (ICL) i.e. showing LLMs only a few task-specific demonstrations has led to downstream gains with no task-specific fine-tuning required. However, LLMs are sensitive to the choice of prompts, and therefore a crucial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Lingyu Gao , Aditi Chaudhary , Krishna Srinivasan , Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

Recent research has investigated the underlying mechanisms of in-context learning (ICL) both theoretically and empirically, often using data generated from simple function classes. However, the existing work often focuses on the sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Ziqian Lin , Shubham Kumar Bharti , Kangwook Lee

Transformer models exhibit in-context learning: the ability to accurately predict the response to a novel query based on illustrative examples in the input sequence. In-context learning contrasts with traditional in-weights learning of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Gautam Reddy

This paper investigates the expected excess risk of in-context learning (ICL) for multiclass classification. We formalize each task as a sequence of labeled examples followed by a query input; a pretrained model then estimates the query's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-03 Chenrui Liu , Falong Tan , Chuanlong Xie , Yicheng Zeng , Lixing Zhu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Zhuowei Li , Zihao Xu , Ligong Han , Yunhe Gao , Song Wen , Di Liu , Hao Wang , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Transformer-based models demonstrate a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to unseen tasks from a few prompt examples without parameter updates. Recent research has illuminated how Transformers perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Haoyuan Sun , Ali Jadbabaie , Navid Azizan