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Related papers: In-Context Learning Strategies Emerge Rationally

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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

Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiuqi Wang , Ethan Blaser , Hadi Daneshmand , Shangtong Zhang

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

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

Interpreting the internal process of neural models has long been a challenge. This challenge remains relevant in the era of large language models (LLMs) and in-context learning (ICL); for example, ICL poses a new issue of interpreting which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Mengyu Ye , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Goro Kobayashi , Jun Suzuki

What is the relationship between model architecture and the ability to perform in-context learning? In this empirical study, we take the first steps toward answering this question. We evaluate thirteen model architectures capable of causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Ivan Lee , Nan Jiang , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

In-Context Learning (ICL) allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks with just a few examples, but their predictions often suffer from systematic biases, leading to unstable performance in classification. While calibration…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Korel Gundem , Juncheng Dong , Dennis Zhang , Vahid Tarokh , Zhengling Qi

In-Context Learning (ICL) is an intriguing ability of large language models (LLMs). Despite a substantial amount of work on its behavioral aspects and how it emerges in miniature setups, it remains unclear which mechanism assembles task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Aleksandra Bakalova , Yana Veitsman , Xinting Huang , Michael Hahn

The emergence of In-Context Learning (ICL) in LLMs remains a remarkable phenomenon that is partially understood. To explain ICL, recent studies have created theoretical connections to Gradient Descent (GD). We ask, do such connections hold…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Lingfeng Shen , Aayush Mishra , Daniel Khashabi

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Peiwen Yuan , Shaoxiong Feng , Yiwei Li , Xinglin Wang , Yueqi Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Heda Wang , Yao Hu , Kan Li

The emerging in-context learning (ICL) ability of large language models (LLMs) has prompted their use for predictive tasks in various domains with different data types, including tabular data, facilitated by serialization methods. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Karuna Bhaila , Minh-Hao Van , Kennedy Edemacu , Chen Zhao , Feng Chen , Xintao Wu

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL), where learning a new task from just a few training examples is done without being explicitly pre-trained. However, despite the success of LLMs, there…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Xindi Wang , Yufei Wang , Can Xu , Xiubo Geng , Bowen Zhang , Chongyang Tao , Frank Rudzicz , Robert E. Mercer , Daxin Jiang

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

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in complex tasks like machine translation, commonsense reasoning, and language understanding. One of the primary reasons for the adaptability of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Nicholas Kroeger , Dan Ley , Satyapriya Krishna , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

We introduce MetaICL (Meta-training for In-Context Learning), a new meta-training framework for few-shot learning where a pretrained language model is tuned to do in-context learning on a large set of training tasks. This meta-training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Sewon Min , Mike Lewis , Luke Zettlemoyer , Hannaneh Hajishirzi

In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as an important new paradigm in natural language processing and large language model (LLM) applications. However, the theoretical understanding of the ICL mechanism remains limited. This paper aims to…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Huaze Tang , Tianren Peng , Shao-lun Huang

With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), the prevalence of iterative interactions among these models is anticipated to increase. Notably, recent advancements in multi-round self-improving methods allow LLMs to generate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Yi Ren , Shangmin Guo , Linlu Qiu , Bailin Wang , Danica J. Sutherland

We introduce iterative retrieval, a novel framework that empowers retrievers to make iterative decisions through policy optimization. Finding an optimal portfolio of retrieved items is a combinatorial optimization problem, generally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Yunmo Chen , Tongfei Chen , Harsh Jhamtani , Patrick Xia , Richard Shin , Jason Eisner , Benjamin Van Durme

In the domain of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has been recognized for its innovative ability to adapt to new tasks, relying on examples rather than retraining or fine-tuning. This paper delves into the critical…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Pengfei He , Han Xu , Yue Xing , Hui Liu , Makoto Yamada , Jiliang Tang

In-Context Learning (ICL) has gained prominence due to its ability to perform tasks without requiring extensive training data and its robustness to noisy labels. A typical ICL workflow involves selecting localized examples relevant to a…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Janak Kapuriya , Manit Kaushik , Debasis Ganguly , Sumit Bhatia