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Transformers have demonstrated a strong ability for in-context learning (ICL), enabling models to solve previously unseen tasks using only example input output pairs provided at inference time. While prior theoretical work has established…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Rushil Chandrupatla , Leo Bangayan , Sebastian Leng

Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven effective at In-Context Learning (ICL), an ability that allows them to create predictors from labeled examples. Few studies have explored the interplay between ICL and specific properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 David Oniani , Yanshan Wang

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

While in-context learning (ICL) has achieved remarkable success in natural language and vision domains, its theoretical understanding-particularly in the context of structured geometric data-remains unexplored. This paper initiates a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhaiming Shen , Alexander Hsu , Rongjie Lai , Wenjing Liao

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Amanda Bertsch , Maor Ivgi , Emily Xiao , Uri Alon , Jonathan Berant , Matthew R. Gormley , Graham Neubig

Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Shohei Taniguchi , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

The predictions of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks often improve significantly when including examples of the input--label relationship in the context. However, there is currently no consensus about how this in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Jannik Kossen , Yarin Gal , Tom Rainforth

Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Damai Dai , Yutao Sun , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Shuming Ma , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

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

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL), where learning a new task from just a few training examples is done without being explicitly pre-trained. However, despite the success of LLMs, there…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Xindi Wang , Yufei Wang , Can Xu , Xiubo Geng , Bowen Zhang , Chongyang Tao , Frank Rudzicz , Robert E. Mercer , Daxin Jiang

Recent interest has surged in employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for machine translation (MT) via in-context learning (ICL) (Vilar et al., 2023). Most prior studies primarily focus on optimizing translation quality, with limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Pranjal A. Chitale , Jay Gala , Raj Dabre

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

Pretrained Transformers demonstrate remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. However, theoretical studies often rely on simplified architectures…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Samet Demir , Zafer Dogan

While attention-based models have demonstrated the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL), the theoretical understanding of how these models acquired this ability through gradient descent training is still preliminary. Towards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Yedi Zhang , Aaditya K. Singh , Peter E. Latham , Andrew Saxe

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the surprising and useful features of large language models and subject of intense research. Recently, stylized meta-learning-like ICL setups have been devised that train transformers on sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Madhur Panwar , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

In-context learning (ICL) allows LLMs to learn from examples without changing their weights: this is a particularly promising capability for long-context LLMs that can potentially learn from many examples. Recently, Lin et al. (2024)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Hao Zhao , Maksym Andriushchenko , Francesco Croce , Nicolas Flammarion

Fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) are two prevalent methods in imbuing large language models with task-specific knowledge. It is commonly believed that fine-tuning can surpass ICL given sufficient training samples as it allows the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Qingyu Yin , Xuzheng He , Luoao Deng , Chak Tou Leong , Fan Wang , Yanzhao Yan , Xiaoyu Shen , Qiang Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Gautam Reddy

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

In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn tasks from demonstration examples without parameter updates. Although it has been extensively studied in LLMs, its effectiveness in Vision-Language Models (VLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Gabriel O. dos Santos , Esther Colombini , Sandra Avila