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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…
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…
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…
Transformer models exhibit in-context learning: the ability to accurately predict the response to a novel query based on illustrative examples in the input sequence. In-context learning contrasts with traditional in-weights learning of…
We study the in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of pretrained Transformers in the setting of nonlinear regression. Specifically, we focus on a random Transformer with a nonlinear MLP head where the first layer is randomly initialized…
Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) describes a language model's ability to generate outputs based on a set of input demonstrations and a subsequent query. To understand this remarkable capability, researchers have studied simplified, stylized…
As model context lengths continue to increase, the number of demonstrations that can be provided in-context approaches the size of entire training datasets. We study the behavior of in-context learning (ICL) at this extreme scale on…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) exhibits dual operating modes: task learning, i.e., acquiring a new skill from in-context samples, and task retrieval, i.e., locating and activating a relevant pretrained skill. Recent theoretical work investigates…
Recent works have suggested that In-Context Learning (ICL) operates in dual modes, i.e. task retrieval (remember learned patterns from pre-training) and task learning (inference-time ''learning'' from demonstrations). However, disentangling…
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,…
In-context learning (ICL) research often considers learning a function in-context through a uniform sample of input-output pairs. Here, we investigate how presenting a compositional subtask curriculum in context may alter the computations a…
Recent advances in tabular in-context learning (ICL) show that a single pretrained model can adapt to new prediction tasks from a small set of labeled examples, avoiding per-task training and heavy tuning. However, many real-world tasks…
We formalize a new concept for LLMs, context-enhanced learning. It involves standard gradient-based learning on text except that the context is enhanced with additional data on which no auto-regressive gradients are computed. This setting…
In-context learning (ICL) is a central capability of Transformer models, but the structures in data that enable its emergence and govern its robustness remain poorly understood. In this work, we study how the structure of pretraining tasks…
Although transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities for in-context learning (ICL) in practice, theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanism that allows transformers to perform ICL is still in its infancy. This work aims…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable flexibility: they can adapt to novel tasks from in-context examples without any parameter updates, a capability known as in-context learning (ICL). Prior work on synthetic tasks has shown that…
Despite the surprising few-shot performance of in-context learning (ICL), it is still a common practice to randomly sample examples to serve as context. This paper advocates a new principle for ICL: self-adaptive in-context learning. The…