English
Related papers

Related papers: Pretrain-Test Task Alignment Governs Generalizatio…

200 papers

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remains poorly understood despite its consistent effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples. To clarify and improve these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Waïss Azizian , Ali Hasan

In-context learning (ICL) is a remarkable capability of pretrained transformers that allows models to generalize to unseen tasks after seeing only a few examples. We investigate empirically the conditions necessary on the pretraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Chase Goddard , Lindsay M. Smith , Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-24 Kaito Takanami , Takashi Takahashi , Yoshiyuki Kabashima

In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yingcong Li , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Xingxuan Zhang , Haoran Wang , Jiansheng Li , Yuan Xue , Shikai Guan , Renzhe Xu , Hao Zou , Han Yu , Peng Cui

Pre-trained large language models have demonstrated a strong ability to learn from context, known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite a surge of recent applications that leverage such capabilities, it is by no means clear, at least…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Bingqing Song , Jiaxiang Li , Rong Wang , Songtao Lu , Mingyi Hong

Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shang Liu , Zhongze Cai , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

Pretrained transformers exhibit the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL): they can learn tasks from just a few examples provided in the prompt without updating any weights. This raises a foundational question: can ICL solve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Allan Raventós , Mansheej Paul , Feng Chen , Surya Ganguli

Large language models (LLM) have recently shown the extraordinary ability to perform unseen tasks based on few-shot examples provided as text, also known as in-context learning (ICL). While recent works have attempted to understand the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Harmon Bhasin , Timothy Ossowski , Yiqiao Zhong , Junjie Hu

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

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Madhur Panwar , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

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

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) is potentially attributed to two major abilities: task recognition (TR) for recognizing the task from demonstrations and utilizing pre-trained priors, and task learning (TL) for learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Xiaolei Wang , Xinyu Tang , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformer-based architectures, have been recently shown to have the capacity to carry out in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a decision on a new input is made via a direct mapping of the input…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Matteo Zecchin , Kai Yu , Osvaldo Simeone

Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Songtao Lu , Xiaodong Cui , Pin-Yu Chen

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

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 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

In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Aaron Mueller , Albert Webson , Jackson Petty , Tal Linzen

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
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›