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In-context learning (ICL), a property demonstrated by transformer-based sequence models, refers to the automatic inference of an input-output mapping based on examples of the mapping provided as context. ICL requires no explicit learning,…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-12 Zihang Song , Osvaldo Simeone , Bipin Rajendran

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 reinforcement learning (ICRL) refers to the ability of RL agents to adapt to new tasks at inference time without parameter updates by conditioning on additional context. Recent empirical studies further demonstrate that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the process of adding a small number of localized examples from a training set of labelled data to an LLM's prompt with an objective to effectively control the generative process seeking to improve the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Manish Chandra , Debasis Ganguly , Iadh Ounis

In-context learning (ICL) derives its power from enabling Large Language Models to adapt to new tasks via prompt-based reasoning alone, entirely bypassing the need for parameter updates. Existing theories primarily study ICL in single-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Guangyu Li , Meng Ding , Lijie Hu

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

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

Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-23 Ruiqi Zhang , Spencer Frei , Peter L. Bartlett

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a key mechanism for harnessing the capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, its effectiveness remains highly sensitive to the quality of input ICL sequences,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yanshu Li , Jianjiang Yang , Tian Yun , Pinyuan Feng , Jinfa Huang , Ruixiang Tang

In-context imitation learning enables robots to adapt to new tasks from a small number of demonstrations without additional training. However, existing approaches typically condition only on state-action trajectories and lack explicit…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Toan Nguyen , Weiduo Yuan , Songlin Wei , Hui Li , Daniel Seita , Yue Wang

Induction head mechanism is a part of the computational circuits for in-context learning (ICL) that enable large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks without fine-tuning. Most existing work explains the training dynamics behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Shuo Wang , Issei Sato

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Lean Wang , Lei Li , Damai Dai , Deli Chen , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Xu Sun

After pre-training by generating the next word conditional on previous words, the Language Model (LM) acquires the ability of In-Context Learning (ICL) that can learn a new task conditional on the context of the given in-context examples…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Haokun Chen , Xu Yang , Yuhang Huang , Zihan Wu , Jing Wang , Xin Geng

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) usage has highlighted the importance of gradient-free in-context learning (ICL). However, interpreting their inner workings remains challenging. This paper introduces a novel multimodal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Yosuke Miyanishi , Minh Le Nguyen

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

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

In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent task/function vector in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong , Taiji Suzuki

Transformers have demonstrated exceptional in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling applications across natural language processing, computer vision, and sequential decision-making. In reinforcement learning, ICL reframes learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Oliver Dippel , Alexei Lisitsa , Bei Peng

Understanding the internal mechanisms of GPT-style transformers, particularly their capacity to perform in-context learning (ICL), is critical for advancing AI alignment and interpretability. In-context learning allows transformers to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Samarth Bhargav , Alexander Gu