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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) in transformers acts as an online associative memory and is believed to underpin their high performance on complex sequence processing tasks. However, in gated linear attention models, this memory has a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Djohan Bonnet , Jamie Lohoff , Jan Finkbeiner , Elidona Skhikerujah , Emre Neftci

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of In-Context Learning (ICL) by addressing several open questions: (a) What type of ICL estimator is learned by large language models? (b) What is a proper performance metric for ICL and what…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-11 Yufeng Zhang , Fengzhuo Zhang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

What is the relationship between model architecture and the ability to perform in-context learning? In this empirical study, we take the first steps toward answering this question. We evaluate thirteen model architectures capable of causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Ivan Lee , Nan Jiang , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

In-context learning (ICL) is one of the most powerful and most unexpected capabilities to emerge in recent transformer-based large language models (LLMs). Yet the mechanisms that underlie it are poorly understood. In this paper, we…

In-context learning (ICL) is now a common method for teaching large language models (LLMs) new tasks: given labeled examples in the input context, the LLM learns to perform the task without weight updates. Do models guided via ICL infer the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Aaron Mueller , Albert Webson , Jackson Petty , Tal Linzen

Large autoregressive models like Transformers can solve tasks through in-context learning (ICL) without learning new weights, suggesting avenues for efficiently solving new tasks. For many tasks, e.g., linear regression, the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sarthak Mittal , Eric Elmoznino , Leo Gagnon , Sangnie Bhardwaj , Tom Marty , Dhanya Sridhar , Guillaume Lajoie

In this work, we explore the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks that were not encountered during training. To achieve this, we conduct synthetic experiments where the objective is to learn OOD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Qixun Wang , Yifei Wang , Yisen Wang , Xianghua Ying

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

In recent years, deep learning has facilitated the creation of wireless receivers capable of functioning effectively in conditions that challenge traditional model-based designs. Leveraging programmable hardware architectures, deep…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Matteo Zecchin , Tomer Raviv , Dileep Kalathil , Krishna Narayanan , Nir Shlezinger , Osvaldo Simeone

The intriguing in-context learning (ICL) abilities of deep Transformer models have lately garnered significant attention. By studying in-context linear regression on unimodal Gaussian data, recent empirical and theoretical works have argued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

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-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Ekin Akyürek , Bailin Wang , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) is becoming a key capability that allows large vision-language models (LVLMs) to adapt to novel tasks without parameter updates, which expands their usefulness in many real-world applications. However,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yanshu Li , Jianjiang Yang , Ziteng Yang , Bozheng Li , Ligong Han , Hongyang He , Zhengtao Yao , Yingjie Victor Chen , Songlin Fei , Dongfang Liu , Ruixiang Tang

We argue that in-context learning (ICL) predictably arises from standard self-supervised next-token pretraining, rather than being an exotic emergent property. This work establishes the foundational principles of this emergence by focusing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Paul M. Riechers , Henry R. Bigelow , Eric A. Alt , Adam Shai

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

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

Predicting simple function classes has been widely used as a testbed for developing theory and understanding of the trained Transformer's in-context learning (ICL) ability. In this paper, we revisit the training of Transformers on linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Shang Liu , Zhongze Cai , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

In-context learning (ICL) has revolutionized the capabilities of transformer models in NLP. In our project, we extend the understanding of the mechanisms underpinning ICL by exploring whether transformers can learn from sequential,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Ryan Campbell , Emma Guo , Evan Hu , Reya Vir , Ethan Hsiao

Test-time training (TTT) enhances model performance by explicitly updating designated parameters prior to each prediction to adapt to the test data. While TTT has demonstrated considerable empirical success, its theoretical underpinnings…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Kento Kuwataka , Taiji Suzuki