Related papers: Single-Position Intervention Fails: Distributed Ou…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are…
We provide causal mechanistic validation that in-context learning (ICL) decomposes into two separable mechanisms: Task Schema (abstract task type recognition) and Binding (specific input-output associations). Through activation patching…
We investigate the mechanistic underpinnings of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models by reconciling two dominant perspectives: the component-level analysis of attention heads and the holistic decomposition of ICL into Task…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks using few examples, with task vectors - specific hidden state activations - hypothesized to encode task information. Existing studies are limited by…
Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities, one of the most important being in-context learning (ICL). With ICL, LLMs can derive the underlying rule from a few demonstrations and provide answers that comply with the…
In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown a remarkable ability to learn and perform complex tasks through in-context learning (ICL). However, a comprehensive understanding of its internal mechanisms is still lacking. This paper explores the…
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,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed NLP with their remarkable In-context Learning (ICL) capabilities. Automated assistants based on LLMs are gaining popularity; however, adapting them to novel tasks is still challenging. While…
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…
In-Context Learning (ICL) enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) with demonstrations. However, obtaining these demonstrations primarily relies on manual effort. In most real-world scenarios, users are often unwilling or…
While random demonstration labels barely hurt in-context learning (Min et al., 2022), we show that homogeneous labels--even semantically valid ones--collapse accuracy to <=12% across six models (Pythia, Llama, Qwen; 0.8B--8B) and four…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Safety alignment in large language models relies on behavioral training that can be overridden when sufficiently strong in-context patterns compete with learned refusal behaviors. We introduce Involuntary In-Context Learning (IICL), an…
In-context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability alongside the development of scaled-up large language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks…