Related papers: Is In-Context Learning Learning?

In-context learning (ICL) -- the capacity of a model to infer and apply abstract patterns from examples provided within its input -- has been extensively studied in large language models trained for next-token prediction on human text. In…

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables transformer-based language models to adapt to new tasks by conditioning on demonstration examples. However, traditional example-driven in-context learning lacks explicit modules for knowledge retrieval and…

Recent work has demonstrated that transformers and linear attention models can perform in-context learning (ICL) on simple function classes, such as linear regression. In this paper, we empirically study how these two attention mechanisms…

In-context learning (ICL)-the ability of transformer-based models to perform new tasks from examples provided at inference time-has emerged as a hallmark of modern language models. While recent works have investigated the mechanisms…

In-context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for performing natural language tasks with Large Language Models (LLM) without updating the models' parameters, in contrast to the traditional gradient-based finetuning. The…

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether…

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. Despite extensive empirical studies, a principled understanding of ICL emergence at scale remains more elusive. We…

This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates…

In-context learning (ICL, also known as few-shot prompting) has been the standard method of adapting LLMs to downstream tasks, by learning from a few input-output examples. Nonetheless, all ICL-based approaches only learn from correct…

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…

Recent interest has surged in employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for machine translation (MT) via in-context learning (ICL) (Vilar et al., 2023). Most prior studies primarily focus on optimizing translation quality, with limited…

Language models that can learn a task at inference time, called in-context learning (ICL), show increasing promise in natural language inference tasks. In ICL, a model user constructs a prompt to describe a task with a natural language…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. However, the underlying working mechanism of ICL remains poorly understood. Recent research presents two conflicting views on ICL: One emphasizes the…

In-context learning (ICL) has shown impressive results in few-shot learning tasks, yet its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. A recent line of work suggests that ICL performs gradient descent (GD)-based optimization…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. However, existing theoretical analysis of ICL primarily exhibits two limitations: (a) Limited i.i.d. Setting. Most studies focus on supervised…

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…

In-context learning (ICL) empowers generative models to address new tasks effectively and efficiently on the fly, without relying on any artificially crafted optimization techniques. In this paper, we study extending ICL to address a…

In-context learning (ICL) approaches typically leverage prompting to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference information. Just-in-time processing of a context is inefficient due to the quadratic cost of self-attention…

In-context learning (ICL) describes a language model's ability to generate outputs based on a set of input demonstrations and a subsequent query. To understand this remarkable capability, researchers have studied simplified, stylized…