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Do large language models (LLMs) represent concepts abstractly, i.e., independent of input format? We revisit Function Vectors (FVs), compact representations of in-context learning (ICL) tasks that causally drive task performance. Across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Gustaw Opiełka , Hannes Rosenbusch , Claire E. Stevenson

Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Steve Yadlowsky , Lyric Doshi , Nilesh Tripuraneni

In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent task/function vector in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong , Taiji Suzuki

The emerging in-context learning (ICL) ability of large language models (LLMs) has prompted their use for predictive tasks in various domains with different data types, including tabular data, facilitated by serialization methods. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Karuna Bhaila , Minh-Hao Van , Kennedy Edemacu , Chen Zhao , Feng Chen , Xintao Wu

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

We investigate the mechanistic underpinnings of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models by reconciling two dominant perspectives: the component-level analysis of attention heads and the holistic decomposition of ICL into Task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haolin Yang , Hakaze Cho , Naoya Inoue

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), which enables the model to perform new tasks conditioning only on the examples provided in the context without updating the model's weights. While ICL offers fast adaptation…

We report the presence of a simple neural mechanism that represents an input-output function as a vector within autoregressive transformer language models (LMs). Using causal mediation analysis on a diverse range of in-context-learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Eric Todd , Millicent L. Li , Arnab Sen Sharma , Aaron Mueller , Byron C. Wallace , David Bau

Autoregressive transformers exhibit adaptive learning through in-context learning (ICL), which begs the question of how. Prior works have shown that transformers represent the ICL tasks as vectors in their representations. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Seungwook Han , Jinyeop Song , Jeff Gore , Pulkit Agrawal

In-context learning (ICL) with dynamically selected demonstrations combines the flexibility of prompting large language models (LLMs) with the ability to leverage training data to improve performance. While ICL has been highly successful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Shivanshu Gupta , Sameer Singh , Ashish Sabharwal , Tushar Khot , Ben Bogin

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities from few-shot demonstration exemplars. While recent learning-based demonstration selection methods have proven beneficial to ICL by choosing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Hui Liu , Wenya Wang , Hao Sun , Chris Xing Tian , Chenqi Kong , Xin Dong , Haoliang Li

In-Context Learning (ICL) is an emergent capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Only a few demonstrations enable LLMs to be used as blackbox for new tasks. Previous studies have shown that using LLMs' outputs as labels is effective in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Georgios Chochlakis , Alexandros Potamianos , Kristina Lerman , Shrikanth Narayanan

In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn tasks from demonstration examples without parameter updates. Although it has been extensively studied in LLMs, its effectiveness in Vision-Language Models (VLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Gabriel O. dos Santos , Esther Colombini , Sandra Avila

Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for AI, with the key ability of in-context learning (ICL), where they can perform well on unseen tasks based on a brief series of task examples without necessitating any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Zhenmei Shi , Junyi Wei , Zhuoyan Xu , Yingyu Liang

In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Tong Yang , Yu Huang , Yingbin Liang , Yuejie Chi

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zheng Zhao , Yftah Ziser , Shay B. Cohen

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

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in complex tasks like machine translation, commonsense reasoning, and language understanding. One of the primary reasons for the adaptability of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Nicholas Kroeger , Dan Ley , Satyapriya Krishna , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

The unusual properties of in-context learning (ICL) have prompted investigations into the internal mechanisms of large language models. Prior work typically focuses on either special attention heads or task vectors at specific layers, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Haolin Yang , Hakaze Cho , Yiqiao Zhong , Naoya Inoue