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Repetition curse is a phenomenon where Large Language Models (LLMs) generate repetitive sequences of tokens or cyclic sequences. While the repetition curse has been widely observed, its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Shuxun Wang , Qingyu Yin , Chak Tou Leong , Qiang Zhang , Linyi Yang

Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Shohei Taniguchi , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

In-context learning is governed by both temporal and semantic relationships, shaping how Large Language Models (LLMs) retrieve contextual information. Analogous to human episodic memory, where the retrieval of specific events is enabled by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Anooshka Bajaj , Deven Mahesh Mistry , Sahaj Singh Maini , Yash Aggarwal , Zoran Tiganj

Large language models (LMs) are currently trained to predict tokens given document prefixes, enabling them to directly perform long-form generation and prompting-style tasks which can be reduced to document completion. Existing pretraining…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across diverse tasks, exhibiting emergent properties such as semantic prompt comprehension, In-Context Learning (ICL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Despite their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yuling Jiao , Yanming Lai , Huazhen Lin , Wensen Ma , Houduo Qi , Defeng Sun

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi

Large language models (LLMs) trained on huge corpora of text datasets demonstrate intriguing capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks they were not explicitly trained for. The precise nature of LLM capabilities is often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Eric J. Bigelow , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka , Tomer D. Ullman

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Transformer architectures are the backbone of the modern AI revolution. However, they are based on simply stacking the same blocks in dozens of layers and processing information sequentially from one block to another. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Prateek Verma , Mert Pilanci

Large language models have the ability to generate text that mimics patterns in their inputs. We introduce a simple Markov Chain sequence modeling task in order to study how this in-context learning (ICL) capability emerges. In our setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Benjamin L. Edelman , Ezra Edelman , Surbhi Goel , Eran Malach , Nikolaos Tsilivis

Large language models (LMs) such as GPT-3 have the surprising ability to do in-context learning, where the model learns to do a downstream task simply by conditioning on a prompt consisting of input-output examples. The LM learns from these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Sang Michael Xie , Aditi Raghunathan , Percy Liang , Tengyu Ma

Though large language models (LLMs) have enabled great success across a wide variety of tasks, they still appear to fall short of one of the loftier goals of artificial intelligence research: creating an artificial system that can adapt its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Michael A. Lepori , Tal Linzen , Ann Yuan , Katja Filippova

In-context learning has been recognized as a key factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). It refers to the model's ability to learn patterns on the fly from provided in-context examples in the prompt during inference. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Bo Chen , Xiaoyu Li , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

Large language models (LLMs) have shown a remarkable ability to learn and perform complex tasks through in-context learning (ICL). However, a comprehensive understanding of its internal mechanisms is still lacking. This paper explores the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Joy Crosbie , Ekaterina Shutova

Induction heads are attention heads that perform inductive copying by matching patterns from earlier context and copying their continuations verbatim. As models develop induction heads, they experience a sharp drop in training loss, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Kerem Sahin , Sheridan Feucht , Adam Belfki , Jannik Brinkmann , Aaron Mueller , David Bau , Chris Wendler

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great potential for in-context learning, where LLMs learn a new task simply by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (prompts). Despite their potential, our understanding of the factors…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Ruixiang Tang , Dehan Kong , Longtao Huang , Hui Xue

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes fail to respond appropriately to deterministic tasks -- such as counting or forming acronyms -- because the implicit prior distribution they have learned over sequences of tokens influences their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Liyi Zhang , Veniamin Veselovsky , R. Thomas McCoy , Thomas L. Griffiths

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate an impressive ability to utilise information within the context of their input sequences to appropriately respond to data unseen by the LLM during its training procedure. This ability is known as…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Thomas F Burns , Tomoki Fukai , Christopher J Earls

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a strong capacity for in-context learning: Given labeled examples, they can generate good predictions without parameter updates. However, many interactive settings go beyond static prediction to online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Emile Anand , Abdullah Ateyeh , Xinyuan Cao , Max Dabagia