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People acquire concepts through rich physical and social experiences and use them to understand and navigate the world. In contrast, large language models (LLMs), trained solely through next-token prediction on text, exhibit strikingly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Ningyu Xu , Qi Zhang , Chao Du , Qiang Luo , Xipeng Qiu , Xuanjing Huang , Menghan Zhang

Recent work has demonstrated that semantics specified by pretraining data influence how representations of different concepts are organized in a large language model (LLM). However, given the open-ended nature of LLMs, e.g., their ability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Core Francisco Park , Andrew Lee , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Yongyi Yang , Maya Okawa , Kento Nishi , Martin Wattenberg , Hidenori Tanaka

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated that systems trained solely on text can acquire extensive world knowledge, develop reasoning capabilities, and internalize abstract semantic concepts--showcasing properties that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Asım Ersoy , Basel Mousi , Shammur Chowdhury , Firoj Alam , Fahim Dalvi , Nadir Durrani

Many recent language models (LMs) of Transformers family exhibit so-called in-context learning (ICL) ability, manifested in the LMs' ability to modulate their function by a task described in a natural language input. Previous work curating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Michal Štefánik , Marek Kadlčík

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit emergent behaviors suggestive of human-like reasoning. While recent work has identified structured conceptual representations within these models, it remains unclear whether they functionally rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ningyu Xu , Qi Zhang , Xipeng Qiu , Xuanjing Huang

Probing and enhancing large language models' reasoning capacity remains a crucial open question. Here we re-purpose the reverse dictionary task as a case study to probe LLMs' capacity for conceptual inference. We use in-context learning to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Ningyu Xu , Qi Zhang , Menghan Zhang , Peng Qian , Xuanjing Huang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

Language is typically modelled with discrete sequences. However, the most successful approaches to language modelling, namely neural networks, are continuous and smooth function approximators. In this work, we show that Transformer-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Samuele Marro , Davide Evangelista , X. Angelo Huang , Emanuele La Malfa , Michele Lombardi , Michael Wooldridge

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Josef Ott

Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Steve Yadlowsky , Lyric Doshi , Nilesh Tripuraneni

In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to learn from a few examples provided in the prompt, enabling downstream generalization without the requirement for gradient updates. Despite encouragingly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Haitao Mao , Guangliang Liu , Yao Ma , Rongrong Wang , Kristen Johnson , Jiliang Tang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the capacity to store and recall facts. Through experimentation with open-source models, we observe that this ability to retrieve facts can be easily manipulated by changing contexts, even without altering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Yibo Jiang , Goutham Rajendran , Pradeep Ravikumar , Bryon Aragam

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Baturay Saglam , Xinyang Hu , Zhuoran Yang , Dionysis Kalogerias , Amin Karbasi

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Zheng Wei Lim , Alham Fikri Aji , Trevor Cohn

In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Hakaze Cho , Mariko Kato , Yoshihiro Sakai , Naoya Inoue

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for easily adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to various tasks. However, our understanding of how ICL works remains limited. We explore a simple model of ICL in a controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Omar Naim , Guilhem Fouilhé , Nicholas Asher

Transformer language models (LMs) have been shown to represent concepts as directions in the latent space of hidden activations. However, for any human-interpretable concept, how can we find its direction in the latent space? We present a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 David Chanin , Anthony Hunter , Oana-Maria Camburu

The opaque nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant research efforts aimed at enhancing their interpretability, primarily through post-hoc methods. More recent in-hoc approaches, such as Concept Bottleneck Models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Or Raphael Bidusa , Shaul Markovitch

Understanding the inner workings of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical research frontier. Prior research has shown that a single LLM's concept representations can be captured as steering vectors (SVs), enabling the control of LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Youcheng Huang , Chen Huang , Duanyu Feng , Wenqiang Lei , Jiancheng Lv

Large-scale Transformer language models (LMs) trained solely on next-token prediction with web-scale data can solve a wide range of tasks after seeing just a few examples. The mechanism behind this capability, known as in-context learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Jingcheng Niu , Subhabrata Dutta , Ahmed Elshabrawy , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych