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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

Language models, especially pre-trained large language models, have showcased remarkable abilities as few-shot in-context learners (ICL), adept at adapting to new tasks with just a few demonstrations in the input context. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Man Luo , Xin Xu , Yue Liu , Panupong Pasupat , Mehran Kazemi

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

We propose Bayesian optimal sequential prediction as a new principle for understanding in-context learning (ICL). Unlike interpretations framing Transformers as performing implicit gradient descent, we formalize ICL as meta-learning over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Di Zhang , Jiaqi Xing

Fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) are two prevalent methods in imbuing large language models with task-specific knowledge. It is commonly believed that fine-tuning can surpass ICL given sufficient training samples as it allows the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Qingyu Yin , Xuzheng He , Luoao Deng , Chak Tou Leong , Fan Wang , Yanzhao Yan , Xiaoyu Shen , Qiang Zhang

Despite the surprising few-shot performance of in-context learning (ICL), it is still a common practice to randomly sample examples to serve as context. This paper advocates a new principle for ICL: self-adaptive in-context learning. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Zhiyong Wu , Yaoxiang Wang , Jiacheng Ye , Lingpeng Kong

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

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a phenomenon where task learning occurs through a prompt sequence without the necessity of parameter updates. ICL in Multi-Headed Attention (MHA) with absolute positional embedding has been the focus of more…

Pre-trained large language models have demonstrated a strong ability to learn from context, known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite a surge of recent applications that leverage such capabilities, it is by no means clear, at least…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Bingqing Song , Jiaxiang Li , Rong Wang , Songtao Lu , Mingyi Hong

We investigate the ability of transformers to perform in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL), where a model must infer and execute learning algorithms from trajectory data without parameter updates. We show that a linear self-attention…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Haodong Liang , Lifeng Lai

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

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

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a technique by which language models make predictions based on examples provided in their input context. Previously, their context window size imposed a limit on the number of examples that can be shown, making…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jinheon Baek , Sun Jae Lee , Prakhar Gupta , Geunseob Oh , Siddharth Dalmia , Prateek Kolhar

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) with dynamically selected demonstrations combines the flexibility of prompting large language models (LLMs) with the ability to leverage training data to improve performance. While ICL has been highly successful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Shivanshu Gupta , Sameer Singh , Ashish Sabharwal , Tushar Khot , Ben Bogin

In-context learning (ICL) enables models to adapt to new tasks via inference-time demonstrations. Despite its success in large language models, the extension of ICL to multimodal settings remains poorly understood in terms of its internal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yu Wang , Sharon Li

Implicit in-context learning (ICL) has newly emerged as a promising paradigm that simulates ICL behaviors in the representation space of Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to attain few-shot performance at zero-shot cost. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jiaqian Li , Yanshu Li , Ligong Han , Ruixiang Tang , Wenya Wang

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

Training autonomous agents that can learn new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations is a long-standing problem in machine learning. Recently, transformers have been shown to learn new language or vision tasks without any weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Sharath Chandra Raparthy , Eric Hambro , Robert Kirk , Mikael Henaff , Roberta Raileanu

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