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In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Tong Yang , Yu Huang , Yingbin Liang , Yuejie Chi

We investigate in-context learning (ICL) through a meticulous experimental framework that systematically varies task complexity and model architecture. Extending beyond the linear regression baseline, we introduce Gaussian kernel regression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Binwen Liu , Peiyu Xu , Quan Yuan , Yihong Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning (ICL), a supervised learning technique that relies on adding annotated examples to the model context. We investigate a contextual bandit version of in-context reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Giovanni Monea , Antoine Bosselut , Kianté Brantley , Yoav Artzi

Large language models (LLMs) exploit in-context learning (ICL) to solve tasks with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not yet well-understood. Some works suggest that LLMs only recall already learned concepts from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Jane Pan , Tianyu Gao , Howard Chen , Danqi Chen

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to adapt to new tasks from demonstrations without parameter updates. Despite extensive empirical studies, a principled understanding of ICL emergence at scale remains more elusive. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sushant Mehta , Ishan Gupta

Transformers have shown a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), making predictions based on contextual examples. However, while theoretical analyses have explored this prediction capability, the nature of the inferred context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Fei Lu , Yue Yu

In-context learning (ICL) enables models to adapt to new tasks via inference-time demonstrations. Despite its success in large language models, the extension of ICL to multimodal settings remains poorly understood in terms of its internal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yu Wang , Sharon Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Shen , Ruida Zhou , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

In-Context Learning (ICL) has been a powerful emergent property of large language models that has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In contrast to regular gradient-based learning, ICL is highly interpretable and does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Brian K Chen , Tianyang Hu , Hui Jin , Hwee Kuan Lee , Kenji Kawaguchi

We investigate whether chemical processes can perform in-context learning (ICL), a mode of computation typically associated with transformer architectures. ICL allows a system to infer task-specific rules from a sequence of examples without…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-01-13 Carlos Floyd , Hector Manuel Lopez Rios , Aaron R. Dinner , Suriyanarayanan Vaikuntanathan

Channel equalization is fundamental for mitigating distortions such as frequency-selective fading and inter-symbol interference. Unlike standard supervised learning approaches that require costly retraining or fine-tuning for each new task,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Jiachen Jiang , Zhen Qin , Zhihui Zhu

In-Context Learning (ICL) has significantly expanded the general-purpose nature of large language models, allowing them to adapt to novel tasks using merely the inputted context. This has motivated a series of papers that analyze tractable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Core Francisco Park , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Itamar Pres , Hidenori Tanaka

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive in-context learning (ICL) capability, enabling them to perform new tasks using only a few demonstrations in the prompt. Two different mechanisms have been proposed to explain ICL: induction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Kayo Yin , Jacob Steinhardt

Recent research has shown that Transformers with linear attention are capable of in-context learning (ICL) by implementing a linear estimator through gradient descent steps. However, the existing results on the optimization landscape apply…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yingcong Li , Ankit Singh Rawat , Samet Oymak

In-context learning (ICL) approaches typically leverage prompting to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference information. Just-in-time processing of a context is inefficient due to the quadratic cost of self-attention…

In-context learning (ICL) adapts LLMs by providing demonstrations without fine-tuning the model parameters; however, it does not differentiate between demonstrations and quadratically increases the complexity of Transformer LLMs, exhausting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Giwon Hong , Emile van Krieken , Edoardo Ponti , Nikolay Malkin , Pasquale Minervini

Accurate uncertainty quantification is crucial for the safe deployment of machine learning models, and prior research has demonstrated improvements in the calibration of modern language models (LMs). We study in-context learning (ICL), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hanlin Zhang , Yi-Fan Zhang , Yaodong Yu , Dhruv Madeka , Dean Foster , Eric Xing , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Sham Kakade

In-context learning (ICL) is a remarkable capability of pretrained transformers that allows models to generalize to unseen tasks after seeing only a few examples. We investigate empirically the conditions necessary on the pretraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Chase Goddard , Lindsay M. Smith , Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

Transformer neural networks can exhibit a surprising capacity for in-context learning (ICL) despite not being explicitly trained for it. Prior work has provided a deeper understanding of how ICL emerges in transformers, e.g. through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Aaditya K. Singh , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Ted Moskovitz , Erin Grant , Andrew M. Saxe , Felix Hill

Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning (IWL), where memorized information is encoded in model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Suraj Anand , Michael A. Lepori , Jack Merullo , Ellie Pavlick