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In-context learning refers to the ability of a model to condition on a prompt sequence consisting of in-context examples (input-output pairs corresponding to some task) along with a new query input, and generate the corresponding output.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Shivam Garg , Dimitris Tsipras , Percy Liang , Gregory Valiant

When deploying Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents into a physical system, we must ensure that these agents are well aware of the underlying constraints. In many real-world problems, however, the constraints are often hard to specify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Guiliang Liu , Yudong Luo , Ashish Gaurav , Kasra Rezaee , Pascal Poupart

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful models that can learn concepts at the inference stage via in-context learning (ICL). While theoretical studies, e.g., \cite{zhang2023trained}, attempt to explain the mechanism of ICL, they assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yue Xing , Xiaofeng Lin , Chenheng Xu , Namjoon Suh , Qifan Song , Guang Cheng

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to explicitly infer an underlying reward function based on collected expert demonstrations. Considering that obtaining expert demonstrations can be costly, the focus of current IRL techniques is on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Lu Li , Yuxin Pan , Ruobing Chen , Jie Liu , Zilin Wang , Yu Liu , Zhiheng Li

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

Many real-life scenarios require humans to make difficult trade-offs: do we always follow all the traffic rules or do we violate the speed limit in an emergency? These scenarios force us to evaluate the trade-off between collective rules…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Arie Glazier , Andrea Loreggia , Nicholas Mattei , Taher Rahgooy , Francesca Rossi , Brent Venable

In-context learning has been recognized as a key factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). It refers to the model's ability to learn patterns on the fly from provided in-context examples in the prompt during inference. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Bo Chen , Xiaoyu Li , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

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

Transformer architectures can solve unseen tasks based on input-output pairs in a given prompt due to in-context learning (ICL). Existing theoretical studies on ICL have mainly focused on linear regression tasks, often with i.i.d. inputs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Yanna Ding , Songtao Lu , Yingdong Lu , Tomasz Nowicki , Jianxi Gao

Despite their effectiveness and popularity in offline or model-based reinforcement learning (RL), transformers remain underexplored in online model-free RL due to their sensitivity to training setups and model design decisions such as how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Nikita Kachaev , Daniil Zelezetsky , Egor Cherepanov , Alexey K. Kovelev , Aleksandr I. Panov

We explore how to enhance next-token prediction models to perform in-context imitation learning on a real robot, where the robot executes new tasks by interpreting contextual information provided during the input phase, without updating its…

In real world settings, numerous constraints are present which are hard to specify mathematically. However, for the real world deployment of reinforcement learning (RL), it is critical that RL agents are aware of these constraints, so that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Usman Anwar , Shehryar Malik , Alireza Aghasi , Ali Ahmed

Transformer-based language models exhibit In-Context Learning (ICL), where predictions are made adaptively based on context. While prior work links induction heads to ICL through a sudden jump in accuracy, this can only account for ICL when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Shohei Taniguchi , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Large pre-trained sequence models, such as transformer-based architectures, have been recently shown to have the capacity to carry out in-context learning (ICL). In ICL, a decision on a new input is made via a direct mapping of the input…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Matteo Zecchin , Kai Yu , Osvaldo Simeone

In-context learning (ICL) is the ability of a model to learn a new task by observing a few exemplars in its context. While prevalent in NLP, this capability has recently also been observed in Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings. Prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Thomas Schmied , Fabian Paischer , Vihang Patil , Markus Hofmarcher , Razvan Pascanu , Sepp Hochreiter

It is essential for an automated vehicle in the field to perform discretionary lane changes with appropriate roadmanship - driving safely and efficiently without annoying or endangering other road users - under a wide range of traffic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Songan Zhang , Lu Wen , Huei Peng , H. Eric Tseng

In-context learning (ICL) is a key building block of modern large language models, yet its theoretical mechanisms remain poorly understood. It is particularly mysterious how ICL operates in real-world applications where tasks have a common…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-24 Kaito Takanami , Takashi Takahashi , Yoshiyuki Kabashima

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged and shown their benefits over discrete representations in recent years. However, fitting an INR to the given observations usually requires optimization with gradient descent from scratch,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Yinbo Chen , Xiaolong Wang

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents frequently face challenges in adapting to tasks outside their training distribution, including issues with over-fitting, catastrophic forgetting and sample inefficiency. Although the application of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yizhao Jin , Greg Slabaugh , Simon Lucas