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Memory-based meta-learning is a technique for approximating Bayes-optimal predictors. Under fairly general conditions, minimizing sequential prediction error, measured by the log loss, leads to implicit meta-learning. The goal of this work…

Transformers enable in-context learning (ICL) for rapid, gradient-free adaptation in time series forecasting, yet most ICL-style approaches rely on tabularized, hand-crafted features, while end-to-end sequence models lack inference-time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Linxiao Yang , Xue Jiang , Gezheng Xu , Tian Zhou , Min Yang , ZhaoYang Zhu , Linyuan Geng , Zhipeng Zeng , Qiming Chen , Xinyue Gu , Rong Jin , Liang Sun

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Chenyang Zhang , Yuan Cao

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

Meta-learning owns unique effectiveness and swiftness in tackling emerging tasks with limited data. Its broad applicability is revealed by viewing it as a bi-level optimization problem. The resultant algorithmic viewpoint however, faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Yilang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Shijian Gao , Georgios B. Giannakis

Transformers pretrained on diverse tasks exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling them to solve unseen tasks solely based on input contexts without adjusting model parameters. In this paper, we study ICL in one of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-18 Jingfeng Wu , Difan Zou , Zixiang Chen , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Peter L. Bartlett

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

Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformer-based architectures, have been recently shown to have the capacity to carry out in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a decision on a new input is made via a direct mapping of the input…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Matteo Zecchin , Kai Yu , Osvaldo Simeone

Transformer-based models demonstrate a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to unseen tasks from a few prompt examples without parameter updates. Recent research has illuminated how Transformers perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Haoyuan Sun , Ali Jadbabaie , Navid Azizan

In-Context Learning (ICL) allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks with just a few examples, but their predictions often suffer from systematic biases, leading to unstable performance in classification. While calibration…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Korel Gundem , Juncheng Dong , Dennis Zhang , Vahid Tarokh , Zhengling Qi

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without weight updates by learning from demonstration sequences. While ICL shows strong empirical performance, its internal representational mechanisms are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jiachen Jiang , Yuxin Dong , Jinxin Zhou , Zhihui Zhu

We present a theory-first framework that interprets inference-time adaptation in large language models (LLMs) as online Bayesian state estimation. Rather than modeling rapid adaptation as implicit optimization or meta-learning, we formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Andrew Kiruluta

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability of large pretrained transformers, enabling them to solve new tasks implicit in example input-output pairs without any gradient updates. Despite its practical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Joshua Hill , Benjamin Eyre , Elliot Creager

In-context learning (ICL) is a type of prompting where a transformer model operates on a sequence of (input, output) examples and performs inference on-the-fly. In this work, we formalize in-context learning as an algorithm learning problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yingcong Li , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xingyu Zhu , Abhishek Panigrahi , Sanjeev Arora

In-context learning is a promising approach for online policy learning of offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods, which can be achieved at inference time without gradient optimization. However, this method is hindered by significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Zhenwen Dai , Federico Tomasi , Sina Ghiassian

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Ziqian Lin , Kangwook Lee

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables transformer-based language models to adapt to new tasks by conditioning on demonstration examples. However, traditional example-driven in-context learning lacks explicit modules for knowledge retrieval and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Pan Chen , Shaohong Chen , Mark Wang , Shi Xuan Leong , Priscilla Fung , Varinia Bernales , Alan Aspuru-Guzik

Regression and Bayesian accounts of in-context learning (ICL) explain how demonstrations can induce predictors, while mechanistic analyses often identify compact activation directions that steer prompted behavior. However, it remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Wei Tang , Xinyan Jiang , Fakhri Karray , Lijie Hu