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In-context learning (ICL) unfolds as large language models become capable of inferring test labels conditioned on a few labeled samples without any gradient update. ICL-enabled large language models provide a promising step forward toward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Eshaan Tanwar , Subhabrata Dutta , Manish Borthakur , Tanmoy Chakraborty

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) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for task adaptation in large language models (LLMs), where models infer underlying task structures from a few demonstrations. However, ICL remains susceptible to biases that arise…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Zhihang Tan , Jingrui Hou , Ping Wang , Qibiao Hu , Peng Zhu

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of In-Context Learning (ICL) by addressing several open questions: (a) What type of ICL estimator is learned by large language models? (b) What is a proper performance metric for ICL and what…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-11 Yufeng Zhang , Fengzhuo Zhang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

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) can perform a new task by merely conditioning on task instructions and a few input-output examples, without optimizing any parameters. This is called In-Context Learning (ICL). In-context Information Extraction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Chaoxu Pang , Yixuan Cao , Qiang Ding , Ping Luo

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

Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from a few examples provided in context at inference, without any weight updates. Newly expanded context windows allow us to investigate ICL with hundreds…

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the impressive ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) from only a few examples, but the success of ICL varies widely from task to task. Thus, it is important to quickly determine whether ICL is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Harvey Yiyun Fu , Qinyuan Ye , Albert Xu , Xiang Ren , Robin Jia

Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions. We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Daniel Wurgaft , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Core Francisco Park , Hidenori Tanaka , Gautam Reddy , Noah D. Goodman

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

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

In-context learning (ICL) allows LLMs to learn from examples without changing their weights: this is a particularly promising capability for long-context LLMs that can potentially learn from many examples. Recently, Lin et al. (2024)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Hao Zhao , Maksym Andriushchenko , Francesco Croce , Nicolas Flammarion

In-context learning (ICL) enables efficient few-shot learning in large language models (LLMs) without training, but suffers from the quadratic input complexity of transformers, limiting the maximum number of exemplars. While various…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Shaoyi Zheng , Canyu Zhang , Tianyi Zhou , Shengjie Wang

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Guangyu Li , Meng Ding , Lijie Hu

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

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a particularly remarkable characteristic of Large Language Models (LLM): given a pretrained LLM and an observed dataset, LLMs can make predictions for new data points from the same distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Fabian Falck , Ziyu Wang , Chris Holmes

In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 William L. Tong , Cengiz Pehlevan

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective approach to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness varies significantly across models and tasks, posing challenges for practitioners to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Dingzriui Wang , Xuanliang Zhang , Keyan Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Yang Deng