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In-context learning (ICL) unfolds as large language models become capable of inferring test labels conditioned on a few labeled samples without any gradient update. ICL-enabled large language models provide a promising step forward toward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Eshaan Tanwar , Subhabrata Dutta , Manish Borthakur , Tanmoy Chakraborty

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

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Xingxuan Zhang , Haoran Wang , Jiansheng Li , Yuan Xue , Shikai Guan , Renzhe Xu , Hao Zou , Han Yu , Peng Cui

Large language models (LLMs) operate in two fundamental learning modes - fine-tuning (FT) and in-context learning (ICL) - raising key questions about which mode yields greater language proficiency and whether they differ in their inductive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bishwamittra Ghosh , Soumi Das , Till Speicher , Qinyuan Wu , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Deepak Garg , Krishna P. Gummadi , Evimaria Terzi

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

Language models have been shown to perform better with an increase in scale on a wide variety of tasks via the in-context learning paradigm. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the ability of a large language model to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-17 Hritik Bansal , Karthik Gopalakrishnan , Saket Dingliwal , Sravan Bodapati , Katrin Kirchhoff , Dan Roth

Human listeners readily adjust to unfamiliar speakers and language varieties through exposure, but do these adaptation benefits extend to state-of-the-art spoken language models? We introduce a scalable framework that allows for in-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Nathan Roll , Calbert Graham , Yuka Tatsumi , Kim Tien Nguyen , Meghan Sumner , Dan Jurafsky

In-context learning (ICL) has become a prominent paradigm to rapidly customize LLMs to new tasks without fine-tuning. However, despite the empirical evidence of its usefulness, we still do not truly understand how ICL works. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Harshita Narnoli , Mihai Surdeanu

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

Large language models (LLMs) have shown the emergent capability of in-context learning (ICL). One line of research has claimed that ICL is functionally equivalent to gradient descent, a type of error-driven learning mechanism. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Zhenghao Zhou , Robert Frank , R. Thomas McCoy

Transformer models, notably large language models (LLMs), have the remarkable ability to perform in-context learning (ICL) -- to perform new tasks when prompted with unseen input-output examples without any explicit model training. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Steve Yadlowsky , Lyric Doshi , Nilesh Tripuraneni

In-context learning (ICL) -- the capacity of a model to infer and apply abstract patterns from examples provided within its input -- has been extensively studied in large language models trained for next-token prediction on human text. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Nathan Breslow , Aayush Mishra , Mahler Revsine , Michael C. Schatz , Anqi Liu , Daniel Khashabi

In-context learning (ICL) has proven highly effective across diverse large language model (LLM) tasks. However, its potential for enhancing tasks that demand step-by-step logical deduction, such as mathematical reasoning, remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Ang Gao , Changshuo Zhang , Xiao Zhang , Deyang Li , Minjun Zhao , Fangchao Liu , Xinyu Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong in-context learning capabilities, but how they track and retrieve information from context remains underexplored. Drawing on the free recall paradigm in cognitive science (where participants…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Anooshka Bajaj , Deven Mahesh Mistry , Sahaj Singh Maini , Yash Aggarwal , Billy Dickson , Zoran Tiganj

"Induction heads" are attention heads that implement a simple algorithm to complete token sequences like [A][B] ... [A] -> [B]. In this work, we present preliminary and indirect evidence for a hypothesis that induction heads might…

We propose to improve in-context learning (ICL) by optimizing the continuous embeddings of a fixed few-shot prompt at test time. The key observation is that the log-probabilities a model assigns to its demonstrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Baturay Saglam , Dionysis Kalogerias

Large Language Models(LLMs) have been attracting attention due to a ability called in-context learning(ICL). ICL, without updating the parameters of a LLM, it is possible to achieve highly accurate inference based on rules ``in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Toma Tanaka , Naofumi Emoto , Tsukasa Yumibayashi

Channel equalization is fundamental for mitigating distortions such as frequency-selective fading and inter-symbol interference. Unlike standard supervised learning approaches that require costly retraining or fine-tuning for each new task,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Jiachen Jiang , Zhen Qin , Zhihui Zhu

In-context learning (ICL) can significantly enhance the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), with the key lying in the selection and ordering of demonstration examples. Previous methods typically relied on simple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Xuetao Ma , Wenbin Jiang , Hua Huang

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves updating at least a few billions of parameters. A more parameter-efficient approach is Prompt Tuning (PT), which updates only a few learnable tokens, and differently, In-Context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Tsachi Blau , Moshe Kimhi , Yonatan Belinkov , Alexander Bronstein , Chaim Baskin