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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

In-context learning (ICL), teaching a large language model (LLM) to perform a task with few-shot demonstrations rather than adjusting the model parameters, has emerged as a strong paradigm for using LLMs. While early studies primarily used…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Man Luo , Xin Xu , Zhuyun Dai , Panupong Pasupat , Mehran Kazemi , Chitta Baral , Vaiva Imbrasaite , Vincent Y Zhao

Traditionally, neural network training has been primarily viewed as an approximation of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). This interpretation originated in a time when training for multiple epochs on small datasets was common and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Samuel Müller , Noah Hollmann , Frank Hutter

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

In-context learning (ICL) is the ability of a large language model (LLM) to learn a new task from a few demonstrations presented as part of the context. Past studies have attributed a large portion of the success of ICL to the way these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Ioana Marinescu , Kyunghyun Cho , Eric Karl Oermann

Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Ekin Akyürek , Bailin Wang , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

This paper investigates context stickiness in in-context learning (ICL), a phenomenon where earlier examples in a prompt interfere with a transformer's ability to adapt to later tasks. Using synthetic regression tasks over linear and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Hanna Rød , Dagny Streit , Nils Valseth Selte , Justin Li

In this work, we explore the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks that were not encountered during training. To achieve this, we conduct synthetic experiments where the objective is to learn OOD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Qixun Wang , Yifei Wang , Yisen Wang , Xianghua Ying

Shortcut learning refers to the phenomenon where models employ simple, non-robust decision rules in practical tasks, which hinders their generalization and robustness. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) in recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Rui Song , Yingji Li , Lida Shi , Fausto Giunchiglia , Hao Xu

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Liuwang Kang , Fan Wang , Shaoshan Liu , Hung-Chyun Chou , Chuan Lin , Ning Ding

In-context learning (ICL) has transformed the use of large language models (LLMs) for NLP tasks, enabling few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples without finetuning. Despite its effectiveness, ICL is prone to errors,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Mario Sanz-Guerrero , Katharina von der Wense

Transformers exhibit in-context learning (ICL): the ability to use novel information presented in the context without additional weight updates. Recent work shows that ICL emerges when models are trained on a sufficiently diverse set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Alex Nguyen , Gautam Reddy

In-context learning (ICL) i.e. showing LLMs only a few task-specific demonstrations has led to downstream gains with no task-specific fine-tuning required. However, LLMs are sensitive to the choice of prompts, and therefore a crucial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Lingyu Gao , Aditi Chaudhary , Krishna Srinivasan , Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

In-context learning (ICL) enables models to adapt to new tasks via inference-time demonstrations. Despite its success in large language models, the extension of ICL to multimodal settings remains poorly understood in terms of its internal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yu Wang , Sharon Li

Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of using in-context learning (ICL) to steer large language models (LLMs) in processing tabular data, a challenging task given the structured nature of such data. Despite advancements in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Jingyu Hu , Weiru Liu , Mengnan Du

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have demonstrated remarkable abilities across diverse tasks, especially as they are scaled up. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art models struggle in certain cases,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Irina Bigoulaeva , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Tomoya Wakayama , Taiji Suzuki

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Anhao Zhao , Fanghua Ye , Jinlan Fu , Xiaoyu Shen

Large language models (LLMs) operate in two fundamental learning modes - fine-tuning (FT) and in-context learning (ICL) - raising key questions about which mode yields greater language proficiency and whether they differ in their inductive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bishwamittra Ghosh , Soumi Das , Till Speicher , Qinyuan Wu , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Deepak Garg , Krishna P. Gummadi , Evimaria Terzi