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In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are…

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to learn new tasks from examples in its input without any parameter updates. In contrast to previous theories of ICL relying on toy models and data settings, recently it has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Francesco Innocenti , El Mehdi Achour

Neural sequence models, especially transformers, exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning. They can construct new predictors from sequences of labeled examples $(x, f(x))$ presented in the input without further parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Ekin Akyürek , Dale Schuurmans , Jacob Andreas , Tengyu Ma , Denny Zhou

Transformers have a remarkable ability to learn and execute tasks based on examples provided within the input itself, without explicit prior training. It has been argued that this capability, known as in-context learning (ICL), is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-06 Yue M. Lu , Mary I. Letey , Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Anindita Maiti , Cengiz Pehlevan

Recent research has demonstrated that transformers, particularly linear attention models, implicitly execute gradient-descent-like algorithms on data provided in-context during their forward inference step. However, their capability in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Max Vladymyrov , Johannes von Oswald , Mark Sandler , Rong Ge

Transformers have significantly impacted domains like natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics, where they improve performance compared to other neural networks. This survey explores how transformers are used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Pranav Agarwal , Aamer Abdul Rahman , Pierre-Luc St-Charles , Simon J. D. Prince , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

In-context learning (ICL), the remarkable ability to solve a task from only input exemplars, is often assumed to be a unique hallmark of Transformer models. By examining commonly employed synthetic ICL tasks, we demonstrate that multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 William L. Tong , Cengiz Pehlevan

The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

We study the approximation capabilities, convergence speeds and on-convergence behaviors of transformers trained on in-context recall tasks -- which requires to recognize the \emph{positional} association between a pair of tokens from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Quan Nguyen , Thanh Nguyen-Tang

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

The binary exponential backoff scheme is widely used in WiFi 7 and still incurs poor throughput performance under dynamic channel environments. Recent model-based approaches (e.g., non-persistent and $p$-persistent CSMA) simply optimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Shugang Hao , Hongbo Li , Lingjie Duan

Autoregressively trained transformers have brought a profound revolution to the world, especially with their in-context learning (ICL) ability to address downstream tasks. Recently, several studies suggest that transformers learn a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Chenyu Zheng , Wei Huang , Rongzhen Wang , Guoqiang Wu , Jun Zhu , Chongxuan Li

Despite the remarkable success of transformer-based models in various real-world tasks, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Recent studies have suggested that transformers can implement gradient descent as an in-context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Xingwu Chen , Lei Zhao , Difan Zou

The transformer architecture, which processes sequences of input tokens to produce outputs for query tokens, has revolutionized numerous areas of machine learning. A defining feature of transformers is their ability to perform previously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Hongbo Li , Lingjie Duan , Yingbin Liang

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

Recent work has shown that Transformers can perform in-context learning for linear regression under restrictive assumptions, including i.i.d. data, Gaussian noise, and Gaussian regression coefficients. However, real-world data often violate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Hoang T. H. Cao , Hai D. V. Trinh , Tho Quan , Lan V. Truong

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

Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling us to solve new problems by transferring knowledge from one situation to another. Yet, developing artificial intelligence systems capable of robust human-like analogical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Philipp Hellwig , Willem Zuidema , Claire E. Stevenson , Martha Lewis

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to condition on a few in-context demonstrations (input-output examples of the underlying task) to generate the answer for a new query input, without updating parameters. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Yongqiang Chen , Binghui Xie , Kaiwen Zhou , Bo Han , Yatao Bian , James Cheng

In-context learning (ICL) has revolutionized the capabilities of transformer models in NLP. In our project, we extend the understanding of the mechanisms underpinning ICL by exploring whether transformers can learn from sequential,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Ryan Campbell , Emma Guo , Evan Hu , Reya Vir , Ethan Hsiao