Related papers: Context Structure Reshapes the Representational Ge…

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a successful paradigm for leveraging large language models (LLMs). However, it often struggles to generalize beyond the distribution of the provided demonstrations. A recent advancement in enhancing…

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…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context reasoning capabilities across a wide range of tasks, particularly with unstructured inputs such as language or images. However, LLMs struggle to handle structured data,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse contexts to support decision-making. While existing evaluations effectively probe latent model capabilities, they often overlook the impact of context framing on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. In this study, we explore a surprising phenomenon related to ICL: LLMs can perform multiple, computationally distinct ICL tasks…

Large language models (LLMs) can learn from a few demonstrations provided at inference time. We study this in-context learning phenomenon through the lens of Gaussian Processes (GPs). We build controlled experiments where models observe…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning, the ability to use information provided as context to improve prediction of future tokens. Induction heads have been argued to play a crucial role for in-context learning in…

This paper evaluates the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage contextual information in the form of structured linguistic representations. Specifically, we examine the impact of encoding both short and long contexts using…

In-context learning (ICL) has become a prominent paradigm to rapidly customize LLMs to new tasks without fine-tuning. However, despite the empirical evidence of its usefulness, we still do not truly understand how ICL works. In this paper,…

Associative learning--forming links between co-occurring items--is fundamental to human cognition, reshaping internal representations in complex ways. Testing hypotheses on how representational changes occur in biological systems is…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities on textual data. We explore whether these capabilities can be extended to continuous vectors from diverse domains, obtained from black-box pretrained…

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are foundational tools for modeling sequential data with latent Markovian structure, yet fitting them to real-world data remains computationally challenging. In this work, we show that pre-trained large language…

Pre-trained large language models based on Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With just a few demonstration examples, the models can implement new tasks without any parameter updates. However, it…

Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving…

In-context learning (ICL) allows Transformers to adapt to novel tasks without weight updates, yet the underlying algorithms remain poorly understood. We adopt a statistical decision-theoretic perspective by investigating simple binary…

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong generalization across diverse tasks, yet the internal decision-making processes behind their predictions remain opaque. In this work, we study the geometry of hidden representations in LLMs through…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the impressive ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) from only a few examples, but the success of ICL varies widely from task to task. Thus, it is important to quickly determine whether ICL is…

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their…

In-context learning (ICL) improves language models' performance on a variety of NLP tasks by simply demonstrating a handful of examples at inference time. It is not well understood why ICL ability emerges, as the model has never been…