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Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) enable parallel decoding by predicting all masked positions at each denoising step, yet existing training-free samplers usually decide which positions to commit at token-level granularity. We revisit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Heqiang Qi , Wei Huang , Mingyuan Bai , Xiangming Meng

Despite the multifaceted recent advances in interventional causal representation learning (CRL), they primarily focus on the stylized assumption of single-node interventions. This assumption is not valid in a wide range of applications, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Burak Varıcı , Emre Acartürk , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Ali Tajer

In-context learning (ICL) is a central capability of Transformer models, but the structures in data that enable its emergence and govern its robustness remain poorly understood. In this work, we study how the structure of pretraining tasks…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-01 Mary I. Letey , Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Yue M. Lu , Cengiz Pehlevan

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for easily adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to various tasks. However, our understanding of how ICL works remains limited. We explore a simple model of ICL in a controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Omar Naim , Guilhem Fouilhé , Nicholas Asher

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) can process many languages, yet how they internally represent this diversity remains unclear. Do they form shared multilingual representations with language-specific decoding, and if so, why does…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Abir Harrasse , Florent Draye , Punya Syon Pandey , Zhijing Jin , Bernhard Schölkopf

In-context learning (ICL) is often motivated by the intuition that demonstrations help because they provide correct input-output examples. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: correctness does not guarantee exemplar utility,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Chenghao Qiu , Chunli Peng , Yufeng Yang , Kuan-Hao Huang , Yi Zhou

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the impressive ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) from only a few examples, but the success of ICL varies widely from task to task. Thus, it is important to quickly determine whether ICL is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Harvey Yiyun Fu , Qinyuan Ye , Albert Xu , Xiang Ren , Robin Jia

The transformer's remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) has sparked a wide range of studies designed to understand its strengths and limitations. However, a theoretical understanding of when ICL can and cannot generalize…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-30 Soo Min Kwon , Alec S. Xu , Can Yaras , Laura Balzano , Qing Qu

Mechanism-targeted synthetic data is increasingly proposed as a way to steer pretraining toward desirable capabilities, but it remains unclear how such interventions should be evaluated. We study this question for in-context learning (ICL)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Mohammed Sabry , Anya Belz

Large language models (LLM) have recently shown the extraordinary ability to perform unseen tasks based on few-shot examples provided as text, also known as in-context learning (ICL). While recent works have attempted to understand the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Harmon Bhasin , Timothy Ossowski , Yiqiao Zhong , Junjie Hu

Self-supervised large language models have demonstrated the ability to perform Machine Translation (MT) via in-context learning, but little is known about where the model performs the task with respect to prompt instructions and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Suzanna Sia , David Mueller , Kevin Duh

Implicit in-context learning (ICL) has newly emerged as a promising paradigm that simulates ICL behaviors in the representation space of Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to attain few-shot performance at zero-shot cost. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jiaqian Li , Yanshu Li , Ligong Han , Ruixiang Tang , Wenya Wang

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

Operating LLMs as coordinated multi-agent research systems over multi-hour runs surfaces failure modes that single-shot evaluation cannot: upstream providers throttle without warning, sub-agents drift the task to fit accessible tools,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sasank Annapureddy

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) 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) 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 Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. In this study, we explore a surprising phenomenon related to ICL: LLMs can perform multiple, computationally distinct ICL tasks…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance improvement through in-context learning (ICL) by leveraging task-specific examples in the input. However, the mechanisms behind this improvement remain elusive. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Safoora Yousefi , Leo Betthauser , Hosein Hasanbeig , Raphaël Millière , Ida Momennejad

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of capabilities, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and linguistic behaviors. We show that many capabilities are highly localized to small subsets of attention heads within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Anna Bair , Yixuan Even Xu , Mingjie Sun , J. Zico Kolter