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Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained the In-Context Learning (ICL) ability with the models scaling up, allowing them to quickly adapt to downstream tasks with only a few demonstration examples prepended in the input sequence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Zhe Yang , Damai Dai , Peiyi Wang , Zhifang Sui

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Guangyu Li , Meng Ding , Lijie Hu

Contextual information at inference time, such as demonstrations, retrieved knowledge, or interaction history, can substantially improve large language models (LLMs) without parameter updates, yet its theoretical role remains poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dingzirui Wang , Xuanliang Zhang , Keyan Xu , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che , Yang Deng

In-context learning (ICL), which promotes inference with several demonstrations, has become a widespread paradigm to stimulate LLM capabilities for downstream tasks. Due to context length constraints, it cannot be further improved in spite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jiahao Li , Quan Wang , Licheng Zhang , Guoqing Jin , Zhendong Mao

In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to learn from a few examples provided in the prompt, enabling downstream generalization without the requirement for gradient updates. Despite encouragingly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Haitao Mao , Guangliang Liu , Yao Ma , Rongrong Wang , Kristen Johnson , Jiliang Tang

In-context learning (ICL) is the remarkable ability displayed by some machine learning models to learn from examples provided in a user prompt without any model parameter updates. ICL was first observed in the domain of large language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Shao-Ting Chiu , Junyuan Hong , Ulisses Braga-Neto

In-context learning (ICL) empowers generative models to address new tasks effectively and efficiently on the fly, without relying on any artificially crafted optimization techniques. In this paper, we study extending ICL to address a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Fan Wang , Chuan Lin , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Baturay Saglam , Xinyang Hu , Zhuoran Yang , Dionysis Kalogerias , Amin Karbasi

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful ability that emerges in transformer models, enabling them to learn from context without weight updates. Recent work has established emergent ICL as a transient phenomenon that can sometimes disappear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Aaditya K. Singh , Ted Moskovitz , Sara Dragutinovic , Felix Hill , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Andrew M. Saxe

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

We study the phenomenon of \textit{in-context learning} (ICL) exhibited by large language models, where they can adapt to a new learning task, given a handful of labeled examples, without any explicit parameter optimization. Our goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Jacob Abernethy , Alekh Agarwal , Teodor V. Marinov , Manfred K. Warmuth

Foundation models (FMs) have recently shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities across diverse scientific domains. In this work, we introduce a unified in-context learning foundation model (ICL-FM) framework for materials…

Transformers excel at in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from demonstrations without parameter updates -- but how they do so remains a mystery. Recent work suggests that Transformers may internally run Gradient Descent (GD), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Deqing Fu , Tian-Qi Chen , Robin Jia , Vatsal Sharan

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves updating at least a few billions of parameters. A more parameter-efficient approach is Prompt Tuning (PT), which updates only a few learnable tokens, and differently, In-Context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Tsachi Blau , Moshe Kimhi , Yonatan Belinkov , Alexander Bronstein , Chaim Baskin

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

Recent research has investigated the underlying mechanisms of in-context learning (ICL) both theoretically and empirically, often using data generated from simple function classes. However, the existing work often focuses on the sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Ziqian Lin , Shubham Kumar Bharti , Kangwook Lee

The remarkable ability of transformers to learn new concepts solely by reading examples within the input prompt, termed in-context learning (ICL), is a crucial aspect of intelligent behavior. Here, we focus on understanding the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sara Dragutinović , Andrew M. Saxe , Aaditya K. Singh

With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Qingxiu Dong , Lei Li , Damai Dai , Ce Zheng , Jingyuan Ma , Rui Li , Heming Xia , Jingjing Xu , Zhiyong Wu , Tianyu Liu , Baobao Chang , Xu Sun , Lei Li , Zhifang Sui

We study the \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) ability of a \emph{Linear Transformer Block} (LTB) that combines a linear attention component and a linear multi-layer perceptron (MLP) component. For ICL of linear regression with a Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-26 Ruiqi Zhang , Jingfeng Wu , Peter L. Bartlett

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