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In-context learning (ICL) emerges as a promising capability of large language models (LLMs) by providing them with demonstration examples to perform diverse tasks. However, the underlying mechanism of how LLMs learn from the provided…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Lean Wang , Lei Li , Damai Dai , Deli Chen , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Xu Sun

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are foundational tools for modeling sequential data with latent Markovian structure, yet fitting them to real-world data remains computationally challenging. In this work, we show that pre-trained large language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Yijia Dai , Zhaolin Gao , Yahya Sattar , Sarah Dean , Jennifer J. Sun

Typically, a modern reinforcement learning (RL) agent solves a task by updating its neural network parameters to adapt its policy to the task. Recently, it has been observed that some RL agents can solve a wide range of new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Jiuqi Wang , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance improvement through in-context learning (ICL) by leveraging task-specific examples in the input. However, the mechanisms behind this improvement remain elusive. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Safoora Yousefi , Leo Betthauser , Hosein Hasanbeig , Raphaël Millière , Ida Momennejad

Transformer models have become foundational across a wide range of scientific and engineering domains due to their strong empirical performance. A key capability underlying their success is in-context learning (ICL): when presented with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Zhen Qin , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu

The evolution of large models has witnessed the emergence of In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of ICL. Inspired by the success of Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Li Li , Yongliang Wu , Jingze Zhu , Jiawei Peng , Jianfei Cai , Xu Yang

Test-time training (TTT) enhances model performance by explicitly updating designated parameters prior to each prediction to adapt to the test data. While TTT has demonstrated considerable empirical success, its theoretical underpinnings…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Kento Kuwataka , Taiji Suzuki

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

We study the \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) ability of a \emph{Linear Transformer Block} (LTB) that combines a linear attention component and a linear multi-layer perceptron (MLP) component. For ICL of linear regression with a Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-26 Ruiqi Zhang , Jingfeng Wu , Peter L. Bartlett

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables pretrained LLMs to adapt to downstream tasks by conditioning on a small set of input-output demonstrations, without any parameter updates. Although there have been many theoretical efforts to explain how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Xuhan Tong , Yuchen Zeng , Jiawei Zhang

In this study, we reveal an in-context learning (ICL) capability of multilingual large language models (LLMs): by translating the input to several languages, we provide Parallel Input in Multiple Languages (PiM) to LLMs, which significantly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yongyu Mu , Peinan Feng , Zhiquan Cao , Yuzhang Wu , Bei Li , Chenglong Wang , Tong Xiao , Kai Song , Tongran Liu , Chunliang Zhang , Jingbo Zhu

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in natural language processing. The most representative ability of LLMs is in-context learning (ICL), which enables LLMs to learn patterns from in-context exemplars…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Jiachen Zhao

In-Context Learning (ICL) has significantly expanded the general-purpose nature of large language models, allowing them to adapt to novel tasks using merely the inputted context. This has motivated a series of papers that analyze tractable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Core Francisco Park , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Itamar Pres , Hidenori Tanaka

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) has emerged as a pivotal capability of auto-regressive large language models, yet it is hindered by a notable sensitivity to the ordering of context examples regardless of their mutual independence. To address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Lizhe Fang , Yifei Wang , Khashayar Gatmiry , Lei Fang , Yisen Wang

Despite the advancements in in-context learning (ICL) for large language models (LLMs), current research centers on specific prompt engineering, such as demonstration selection, with the expectation that a single iteration of demonstrations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Jiaxi Yang , Binyuan Hui , Min Yang , Bailin Wang , Bowen Li , Binhua Li , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

Understanding in-context learning (ICL) capability that enables large language models (LLMs) to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples is of utmost importance. This importance stems not only from the better utilization of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yuxiang Zhou , Jiazheng Li , Yanzheng Xiang , Hanqi Yan , Lin Gui , Yulan He

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Pan Chen , Shaohong Chen , Mark Wang , Shi Xuan Leong , Priscilla Fung , Varinia Bernales , Alan Aspuru-Guzik

We study how in-context learning (ICL) in language models is affected by semantic priors versus input-label mappings. We investigate two setups-ICL with flipped labels and ICL with semantically-unrelated labels-across various model families…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Jerry Wei , Jason Wei , Yi Tay , Dustin Tran , Albert Webson , Yifeng Lu , Xinyun Chen , Hanxiao Liu , Da Huang , Denny Zhou , Tengyu Ma

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) studies agents that, after pretraining, adapt to new tasks by conditioning on additional context without parameter updates. Existing theoretical analyses of ICRL largely rely on linear attention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang