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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

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

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform new tasks by prompting them with a sequence of training examples. However, it is known that ICL is very sensitive to the choice of training examples: randomly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Ting-Yun Chang , Robin Jia

In-context learning (ICL) research often considers learning a function in-context through a uniform sample of input-output pairs. Here, we investigate how presenting a compositional subtask curriculum in context may alter the computations a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Jin Hwa Lee , Andrew K. Lampinen , Aaditya K. Singh , Andrew M. Saxe

Large language models (LLMs) can perform a new task by merely conditioning on task instructions and a few input-output examples, without optimizing any parameters. This is called In-Context Learning (ICL). In-context Information Extraction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Chaoxu Pang , Yixuan Cao , Qiang Ding , Ping Luo

We introduce a new family of toy problems that combine features of linear-regression-style continuous in-context learning (ICL) with discrete associative recall. We pretrain transformer models on sample traces from this toy, specifically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Sultan Daniels , Dylan Davis , Dhruv Gautam , Wentinn Liao , Gireeja Ranade , Anant Sahai

For question-answering (QA) tasks, in-context learning (ICL) enables language models to generate responses without modifying their parameters by leveraging examples provided in the input. However, the effectiveness of ICL heavily depends on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Ruhan Wang , Zhiyong Wang , Chengkai Huang , Rui Wang , Tong Yu , Lina Yao , John C. S. Lui , Dongruo Zhou

Despite its success, existing in-context learning (ICL) relies on in-domain expert demonstrations, limiting its applicability when expert annotations are scarce. We posit that different domains may share underlying reasoning structures,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Le Liu , Zhiming Li , Jianzhi Yan , Zike Yuan , Shiwei Chen , Youcheng Pan , Buzhou Tang , Qingcai Chen , Yang Xiang , Danny Dongning Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to organize the representations of input sequences into straighter neural trajectories in their deep layers, which has been hypothesized to facilitate next-token prediction via linear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Eghbal A. Hosseini , Yuxuan Li , Yasaman Bahri , Declan Campbell , Andrew Kyle Lampinen

Recently, the mysterious In-Context Learning (ICL) ability exhibited by Transformer architectures, especially in large language models (LLMs), has sparked significant research interest. However, the resilience of Transformers' in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Chen Cheng , Xinzhi Yu , Haodong Wen , Jingsong Sun , Guanzhang Yue , Yihao Zhang , Zeming Wei

Recent works have suggested that In-Context Learning (ICL) operates in dual modes, i.e. task retrieval (remember learned patterns from pre-training) and task learning (inference-time ''learning'' from demonstrations). However, disentangling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Zhouxiang Fang , Aayush Mishra , Muhan Gao , Anqi Liu , Daniel Khashabi

Adapting one's thought process based on corrective feedback is an essential ability in human learning, particularly in collaborative settings. In contrast, the current large language model training paradigm relies heavily on modeling vast,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Martin Klissarov , Jonathan Cook , Diego Antognini , Hao Sun , Jingling Li , Natasha Jaques , Claudiu Musat , Edward Grefenstette

Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs) have had exceptional success in language generation. To leverage the rich knowledge encoded by PLMs, a simple yet powerful paradigm is to use prompts in the form of either discrete tokens or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Tianyi Tang , Junyi Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) as it empowers them to comprehend and reason across interconnected inputs. Evaluating the ICL ability of LLMs can enhance their utilization and deepen our…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Wentong Chen , Yankai Lin , ZhenHao Zhou , HongYun Huang , Yantao Jia , Zhao Cao , Ji-Rong Wen

The pretrain-finetuning paradigm in large-scale sequence models has made significant progress in natural language processing and computer vision tasks. However, such a paradigm is still hindered by several challenges in Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Runji Lin , Ye Li , Xidong Feng , Zhaowei Zhang , Xian Hong Wu Fung , Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang , Yali Du , Yaodong Yang

Auditory Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of speech and audio understanding tasks. Nevertheless, they often struggle when applied to low-resource tasks. In case in-domain labeled data are…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Haolong Zheng , Siyin Wang , Zengrui Jin , Mark Hasegawa-Johnson

Recent advancements in language models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning abilities, prompting the exploration of in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) to extend the promise to decision domains. Due to involving more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Jinmei Liu , Fuhong Liu , Zhenhong Sun , Jianye Hao , Huaxiong Li , Bo Wang , Daoyi Dong , Chunlin Chen , Zhi Wang

In-context learning (ICL) i.e. showing LLMs only a few task-specific demonstrations has led to downstream gains with no task-specific fine-tuning required. However, LLMs are sensitive to the choice of prompts, and therefore a crucial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Lingyu Gao , Aditi Chaudhary , Krishna Srinivasan , Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman , Michael Bendersky

Large transformer models pretrained on offline reinforcement learning datasets have demonstrated remarkable in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) capabilities, where they can make good decisions when prompted with interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Licong Lin , Yu Bai , Song Mei

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising results in sentiment analysis through the in-context learning (ICL) paradigm. However, their ability to distinguish subtle sentiments still remains a challenge. Inspired by the human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Hongling Xu , Qianlong Wang , Yice Zhang , Min Yang , Xi Zeng , Bing Qin , Ruifeng Xu