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Learning representations for individual instances when only bag-level labels are available is a fundamental challenge in multiple instance learning (MIL). Recent works have shown promising results using contrastive self-supervised learning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Kangning Liu , Weicheng Zhu , Yiqiu Shen , Sheng Liu , Narges Razavian , Krzysztof J. Geras , Carlos Fernandez-Granda

Recent reasoning LLMs (RLMs), especially those trained with verifier-based reinforcement learning, often perform worse with few-shot CoT than with direct answering. We revisit this paradox using high-quality reasoning traces from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haonan Wang , Weida Liang , Zihang Fu , Nie Zheng , Yifan Zhang , Yao Tong , Tongyao Zhu , Hao Jiang , Chuang Li , Jiaying Wu , Kenji Kawaguchi

In-context learning (ICL) is often motivated by the intuition that demonstrations help because they provide correct input-output examples. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: correctness does not guarantee exemplar utility,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Chenghao Qiu , Chunli Peng , Yufeng Yang , Kuan-Hao Huang , Yi Zhou

Transformers excel at in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from demonstrations without parameter updates -- but how they do so remains a mystery. Recent work suggests that Transformers may internally run Gradient Descent (GD), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Deqing Fu , Tian-Qi Chen , Robin Jia , Vatsal Sharan

Although transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities for in-context learning (ICL) in practice, theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanism that allows transformers to perform ICL is still in its infancy. This work aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Shen , Ruida Zhou , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Demonstration selection is a practical bottleneck in in-context learning (ICL): under a tight prompt budget, accuracy can change substantially depending on which few-shot examples are included, yet selection must remain cheap enough to run…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Xubin Wang , Weijia Jia

Transformer models exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL), adapting to novel tasks from examples within their context, yet the underlying mechanisms remain largely mysterious. Here, we provide an exact analytical characterization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Nischal Mainali , Lucas Teixeira

Long-context large language models (LLMs) are able to process inputs containing up to several million tokens. In the scope of in-context learning (ICL), this translates into using hundreds/thousands of demonstrations in the input prompt,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Shahriar Golchin , Yanfei Chen , Rujun Han , Manan Gandhi , Tianli Yu , Swaroop Mishra , Mihai Surdeanu , Rishabh Agarwal , Chen-Yu Lee , Tomas Pfister

Large Language Models (LLM) hold immense promise for real-world applications, but their generic knowledge often falls short of domain-specific needs. Fine-tuning, a common approach, can suffer from catastrophic forgetting and hinder…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Emile Contal , Garrin McGoldrick

Large language models (LLMs) benefit greatly from prompt engineering, with in-context learning standing as a pivital technique. While former approaches have provided various ways to construct the demonstrations used for in-context learning,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yiming Tang , Bin Dong

Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-23 Ruiqi Zhang , Spencer Frei , Peter L. Bartlett

In this work we revisit the most fundamental building block in deep learning, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and study the limits of its performance on vision tasks. Empirical insights into MLPs are important for multiple reasons. (1)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Gregor Bachmann , Sotiris Anagnostidis , Thomas Hofmann

In-context learning (ICL) has proven to be a significant capability with the advancement of Large Language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks without…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Quanyu Long , Jianda Chen , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to perform few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples in the prompt. Despite its flexibility, ICL suffers from instability -- especially as prompt length increases with more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Josip Jukić , Jan Šnajder

Continual Learning (CL) methods have traditionally focused on mitigating catastrophic forgetting through gradient-based retraining, an approach ill-suited for deployed agents that must adapt in real time. We introduce our Adaptive Teaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Aman Jaglan , Jarrod Barnes

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Sewon Min , Xinxi Lyu , Ari Holtzman , Mikel Artetxe , Mike Lewis , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Luke Zettlemoyer

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

In-context learning (ICL) of large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention in the community where LLMs make predictions only based on instructions augmented with a few examples. Existing example selection methods for ICL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Haowei Du , Dongyan Zhao

Improving generalization and achieving highly predictive, robust machine learning models necessitates learning the underlying causal structure of the variables of interest. A prominent and effective method for this is learning invariant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Jawad Chowdhury , Gabriel Terejanu

Practical Imitation Learning (IL) systems rely on large human demonstration datasets for successful policy learning. However, challenges lie in maintaining the quality of collected data and addressing the suboptimal nature of some…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Sachit Kuhar , Shuo Cheng , Shivang Chopra , Matthew Bronars , Danfei Xu