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Task vectors offer a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Yuxin Dong , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu , Xia Ning

Language models exhibit an emergent ability to learn a new task from a small number of input-output demonstrations. However, recent work shows that in-context learners largely rely on their pre-trained knowledge, such as the sentiment of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Michal Štefánik , Marek Kadlčík

We uncover an ever-overlooked deficiency in the prevailing Few-Shot Learning (FSL) methods: the pre-trained knowledge is indeed a confounder that limits the performance. This finding is rooted from our causal assumption: a Structural Causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Zhongqi Yue , Hanwang Zhang , Qianru Sun , Xian-Sheng Hua

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bowen Zheng , Ming Ma , Zhongqiao Lin , Tianming Yang

Do large language models (LLMs) represent concepts abstractly, i.e., independent of input format? We revisit Function Vectors (FVs), compact representations of in-context learning (ICL) tasks that causally drive task performance. Across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Gustaw Opiełka , Hannes Rosenbusch , Claire E. Stevenson

In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm based on modern Language Models (LMs), yet its inner mechanism remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate the mechanism through a novel perspective of information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Hakaze Cho , Haolin Yang , Gouki Minegishi , Naoya Inoue

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of coding tasks, including summarization, translation, completion, and code generation. Despite these advances, detecting code vulnerabilities…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Md Abdul Hannan , Ronghao Ni , Chi Zhang , Limin Jia , Ravi Mangal , Corina S. Pasareanu

While many-shot ICL achieves remarkable performance, prior studies of its scaling behavior have mainly focused on non-reasoning tasks. In this work, we study many-shot ICL on reasoning tasks, with a particular focus on many-shot…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Tsz Ting Chung , Lemao Liu , Mo Yu , Dit-Yan Yeung

In-Context Learning (ICL) is an intriguing ability of large language models (LLMs). Despite a substantial amount of work on its behavioral aspects and how it emerges in miniature setups, it remains unclear which mechanism assembles task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Aleksandra Bakalova , Yana Veitsman , Xinting Huang , Michael Hahn

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Peiwen Yuan , Shaoxiong Feng , Yiwei Li , Xinglin Wang , Yueqi Zhang , Chuyi Tan , Boyuan Pan , Heda Wang , Yao Hu , Kan Li

This paper presents the first study on adapting the visual in-context learning (V-ICL) paradigm to optical character recognition tasks, specifically focusing on text removal and segmentation. Most existing V-ICL generalists employ a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Fei Zhang , Pei Zhang , Baosong Yang , Fei Huang , Yanfeng Wang , Ya Zhang

Language Models (LMs) can perform new tasks by adapting to a few in-context examples. For humans, explanations that connect examples to task principles can improve learning. We therefore investigate whether explanations of few-shot examples…

Few-shot learning is often motivated by the ability of humans to learn new tasks from few examples. However, standard few-shot classification benchmarks assume that the representation is learned on a limited amount of base class data,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Yann Lifchitz , Yannis Avrithis , Sylvaine Picard

In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks from a few examples, making it promising for languages underrepresented in pre-training. Recent work on many-shot ICL suggests that modern LLMs can further…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yinhan Lu , Gaganpreet Jhajj , Chen Zhang , Anietie Andy , David Ifeoluwa Adelani

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate emergent in-context learning capabilities, where they adapt to new tasks based on example demonstrations. However, in-context learning has seen limited effectiveness in many settings, is difficult to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Sheng Liu , Haotian Ye , Lei Xing , James Zou

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in a large number of downstream tasks. Nonetheless, compositional image understanding remains a rather difficult task due to the object bias present in training data. In this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Matteo Nulli , Anesa Ibrahimi , Avik Pal , Hoshe Lee , Ivona Najdenkoska

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables pretrained LLMs to adapt to downstream tasks by conditioning on a small set of input-output demonstrations, without any parameter updates. Although there have been many theoretical efforts to explain how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Xuhan Tong , Yuchen Zeng , Jiawei Zhang

Transformer-based language models excel at in-context learning (ICL), where they can adapt to new tasks based on contextual examples, without parameter updates. In a specific form of ICL, which we refer to as \textit{contextual recall},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Bhavya Vasudeva , Puneesh Deora , Alberto Bietti , Vatsal Sharan , Christos Thrampoulidis

Real-world applications of large language models (LLMs) in computational social science (CSS) tasks primarily depend on the effectiveness of instruction tuning (IT) or in-context learning (ICL). While IT has shown highly effective at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Taihang Wang , Xiaoman Xu , Yimin Wang , Ye Jiang

With in-context learning ability, the performance of large language models can be significantly boosted when provided with appropriate context. However, existing in-context learning methods mainly rely on human-provided contexts, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Jinghan Yang , Shuming Ma , Furu Wei