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A striking property of transformers is their ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), a machine learning framework in which the learner is presented with a novel context during inference implicitly through some data, and tasked with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Liam Collins , Advait Parulekar , Aryan Mokhtari , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai

Pre-trained large language models based on Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) abilities. With just a few demonstration examples, the models can implement new tasks without any parameter updates. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Ruifeng Ren , Yong Liu

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Chenyang Zhang , Yuan Cao

Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiuqi Wang , Ethan Blaser , Hadi Daneshmand , Shangtong Zhang

The remarkable ability of transformers to learn new concepts solely by reading examples within the input prompt, termed in-context learning (ICL), is a crucial aspect of intelligent behavior. Here, we focus on understanding the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sara Dragutinović , Andrew M. Saxe , Aaditya K. Singh

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) refers to the ability of RL agents to adapt to new tasks at inference time without parameter updates by conditioning on additional context. Recent empirical studies further demonstrate that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

Typically, a modern reinforcement learning (RL) agent solves a task by updating its neural network parameters to adapt its policy to the task. Recently, it has been observed that some RL agents can solve a wide range of new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Jiuqi Wang , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

Pretrained Transformers can perform in-context learning (ICL) from a few demonstrations, but this ability can fail sharply when the test distribution differs from pretraining, a common deployment setting. We study attention temperature as a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Samet Demir , Zafer Dogan

We investigate the ability of transformers to perform in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL), where a model must infer and execute learning algorithms from trajectory data without parameter updates. We show that a linear self-attention…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Haodong Liang , Lifeng Lai

Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

Mechanistic accounts of in-context learning (ICL) have identified iterative algorithms for linear regression and related linear prediction tasks, often using linear or ReLU attention variants. For nonlinear ICL, prior work has related…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Mingsong Yan , Dongyang Li , Charles Kulick , Sui Tang

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance in natural language processing, making them highly effective in many human life-related or even job-related tasks. The attention mechanism in the Transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Shuai Li , Zhao Song , Yu Xia , Tong Yu , Tianyi Zhou

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) is an emerging RL paradigm where an agent, after pretraining, can adapt to out-of-distribution test tasks without any parameter updates, instead relying on an expanding context of interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Amir Moeini , Minjae Kwon , Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Yuichi Motai , Rohan Chandra , Lu Feng , Shangtong Zhang

In-context learning (ICL) refers to the ability of a model to learn new tasks from examples in its input without any parameter updates. In contrast to previous theories of ICL relying on toy models and data settings, recently it has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Francesco Innocenti , El Mehdi Achour

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

Transformers have shown a remarkable ability for in-context learning (ICL), making predictions based on contextual examples. However, while theoretical analyses have explored this prediction capability, the nature of the inferred context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Fei Lu , Yue Yu

Large language models (LLMs) have brought significant and transformative changes in human society. These models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, leading to various advancements and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Yeqi Gao , Zhao Song , Shenghao Xie

Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-23 Ruiqi Zhang , Spencer Frei , Peter L. Bartlett

We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jianliang He , Xintian Pan , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang

Transformers have a remarkable ability to learn and execute tasks based on examples provided within the input itself, without explicit prior training. It has been argued that this capability, known as in-context learning (ICL), is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-06 Yue M. Lu , Mary I. Letey , Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Anindita Maiti , Cengiz Pehlevan
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