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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

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) is potentially attributed to two major abilities: task recognition (TR) for recognizing the task from demonstrations and utilizing pre-trained priors, and task learning (TL) for learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Xiaolei Wang , Xinyu Tang , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

In-context Learning enables training-free adaptation via demonstrations but remains highly sensitive to example selection and formatting. In unified multimodal models spanning understanding and generation, this sensitivity is exacerbated by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Yicheng Xu , Jiangning Zhang , Zhucun Xue , Teng Hu , Ran Yi , Xiaobin Hu , Yong Liu , Dacheng Tao

In-context learning (ICL) is the remarkable ability displayed by some machine learning models to learn from examples provided in a user prompt without any model parameter updates. ICL was first observed in the domain of large language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Shao-Ting Chiu , Junyuan Hong , Ulisses Braga-Neto

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

We propose Bayesian optimal sequential prediction as a new principle for understanding in-context learning (ICL). Unlike interpretations framing Transformers as performing implicit gradient descent, we formalize ICL as meta-learning over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Di Zhang , Jiaqi Xing

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning (ICL) without parameter updates, making them powerful learning engines for fast adaptation. While extensive research has examined ICL as a few-shot learner, whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Liuwang Kang , Fan Wang , Shaoshan Liu , Hung-Chyun Chou , Chuan Lin , Ning Ding

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

We present the problem of inverse constraint learning (ICL), which recovers constraints from demonstrations to autonomously reproduce constrained skills in new scenarios. However, ICL suffers from an ill-posed nature, leading to inaccurate…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Jaehwi Jang , Minjae Song , Daehyung Park

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

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful ability that emerges in transformer models, enabling them to learn from context without weight updates. Recent work has established emergent ICL as a transient phenomenon that can sometimes disappear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Aaditya K. Singh , Ted Moskovitz , Sara Dragutinovic , Felix Hill , Stephanie C. Y. Chan , Andrew M. Saxe

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to organize the representations of input sequences into straighter neural trajectories in their deep layers, which has been hypothesized to facilitate next-token prediction via linear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Eghbal A. Hosseini , Yuxuan Li , Yasaman Bahri , Declan Campbell , Andrew Kyle Lampinen

Regression models often fail to generalize effectively in regions characterized by highly imbalanced label distributions. Previous methods for deep imbalanced regression rely on gradient-based weight updates, which tend to overfit in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Ismail Nejjar , Faez Ahmed , Olga Fink

In-context learning (ICL) research often considers learning a function in-context through a uniform sample of input-output pairs. Here, we investigate how presenting a compositional subtask curriculum in context may alter the computations a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Jin Hwa Lee , Andrew K. Lampinen , Aaditya K. Singh , Andrew M. Saxe

Large language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning from a few demonstrations (example-label pairs) to solve new tasks during inference. Despite the intuitive importance of high-quality demonstrations, previous work has observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Junyi Tao , Xiaoyin Chen , Nelson F. Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Chaeha Kim

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

Large-scale neural language models exhibit a remarkable capacity for in-context learning (ICL): they can infer novel functions from datasets provided as input. Most of our current understanding of when and how ICL arises comes from LMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Ekin Akyürek , Bailin Wang , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

Large language models (LLMs) perform in-context learning (ICL) with minimal supervised examples, which benefits various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. One of the critical research focus is the selection of prompt demonstrations.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Haoyang Chen , Richong Zhang , Junfan Chen

We investigate training strategies that co-develop in-context learning (ICL) and in-weights learning (IWL), and the ability to switch between them based on context relevance. Although current LLMs exhibit both modes, standard task-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Deeptanshu Malu , Deevyanshu Malu , Aditya Nemiwal , Sunita Sarawagi