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Related papers: In-Context Learning Strategies Emerge Rationally

200 papers

Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shang Liu , Zhongze Cai , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

In-context learning (ICL) exhibits dual operating modes: task learning, i.e., acquiring a new skill from in-context samples, and task retrieval, i.e., locating and activating a relevant pretrained skill. Recent theoretical work investigates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Ziqian Lin , Kangwook Lee

In-context learning (ICL) allows some autoregressive models to solve tasks via next-token prediction and without needing further training. This has led to claims about these model's ability to solve (learn) unseen tasks with only a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Adrian de Wynter

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Qingxiu Dong , Lei Li , Damai Dai , Ce Zheng , Jingyuan Ma , Rui Li , Heming Xia , Jingjing Xu , Zhiyong Wu , Tianyu Liu , Baobao Chang , Xu Sun , Lei Li , Zhifang Sui

Transformer neural networks can exhibit a surprising capacity for in-context learning (ICL) despite not being explicitly trained for it. Prior work has provided a deeper understanding of how ICL emerges in transformers, e.g. through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Aaditya K. Singh , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Ted Moskovitz , Erin Grant , Andrew M. Saxe , Felix Hill

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

In-context learning (ICL) improves language models' performance on a variety of NLP tasks by simply demonstrating a handful of examples at inference time. It is not well understood why ICL ability emerges, as the model has never been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Xiaochuang Han , Daniel Simig , Todor Mihaylov , Yulia Tsvetkov , Asli Celikyilmaz , Tianlu Wang

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) 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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yingcong Li , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

This paper investigates context stickiness in in-context learning (ICL), a phenomenon where earlier examples in a prompt interfere with a transformer's ability to adapt to later tasks. Using synthetic regression tasks over linear and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Hanna Rød , Dagny Streit , Nils Valseth Selte , Justin Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), which enables the model to perform new tasks conditioning only on the examples provided in the context without updating the model's weights. While ICL offers fast adaptation…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Faris Chaudhry , Siddhant Gadkari

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

The capability of predicting environmental dynamics underpins both biological neural systems and general embodied AI in adapting to their surroundings. Yet prevailing approaches rest on static world models that falter when confronted with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Fan Wang , Zhiyuan Chen , Yuxuan Zhong , Sunjian Zheng , Pengtao Shao , Bo Yu , Shaoshan Liu , Jianan Wang , Ning Ding , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

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

Transformers have emerged as the dominant architecture in the field of deep learning, with a broad range of applications and remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. While not yet fully understood, ICL has already proved to be an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Arik Reuter , Tim G. J. Rudner , Vincent Fortuin , David Rügamer

Large language models (LLM) have recently shown the extraordinary ability to perform unseen tasks based on few-shot examples provided as text, also known as in-context learning (ICL). While recent works have attempted to understand the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Harmon Bhasin , Timothy Ossowski , Yiqiao Zhong , Junjie Hu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jiachen Jiang , Yuxin Dong , Jinxin Zhou , Zhihui Zhu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Jane Pan , Tianyu Gao , Howard Chen , Danqi Chen