Understanding In-Context Learning via Supportive Pretraining Data (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a form of learning that provides a handful of examples at inference time, but it is not well understood why it emerges as the model has never been specifically trained on such demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They adapt an iterative, gradient-based approach to find a small subset of pretraining data that supports ICL and compare it with random subsets of pretrain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model's ICL ability by 18% if it is continued on a small subset of pretraining data. |
Similar Papers
A Survey to Recent Progress Towards Understanding In-Context Learning (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on In-Context Learning (ICL) is unclear, despite empirical success . a data generation perspective is used to interpret ICL . |
| Approach: | They propose to use data generation to reinterpret recent efforts from a systematic angle to demonstrate the potential broader usage of ICL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn from examples provided in the prompt, enabling downstream generalization without the need for gradient updates. |
A Survey on In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing . large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to learn from a few examples . |
| Approach: | They propose to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
Pre-Training to Learn in Context (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are not explicitly trained to learn in context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance in-context learning by pre-training language models on a large collection of "intrinsic tasks" they evaluate the in-constitution learning performance of the model trained with PICL on seven widely-used text classification datasets and the Super-NaturalInstrctions benchmark . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms larger language models with nearly 4x parameters on seven widely-used datasets and the Super-NaturalInstrctions benchmark. |
The Mystery of In-Context Learning: A Comprehensive Survey on Interpretation and Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a capability that enables large language models to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples. |
| Approach: | They present a survey on the interpretation and analysis of in-context learning . they focus on theoretical and empirical perspectives on the concept . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform tasks with minimal examples without re-training and has demonstrated proficiency across various tasks with a minimal set of task-oriented examples. |
In-context Learning and Gradient Descent Revisited (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) has shown impressive results in few-shot learning tasks, yet its underlying mechanism remains elusive. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple gradient descent-based optimization procedure that respects layer causality and improves similarity scores significantly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure improves similarity scores on untrained models despite not showing ICL. |
ICLEval: Evaluating In-Context Learning Ability of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks focus on language abilities and knowledge, often overlooking the assessment of ICL ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the ICL ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) using the ICLEval benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that ICL ability is universally present in different LLMs and model size is not the sole determinant of ICL efficacy. |
Parallel Structures in Pre-training Data Yield In-Context Learning (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL) however, it is unclear where this ability comes from as there is a stark distribution shift between pre-training text and ICL prompts. |
| Approach: | They find that pre-trained language models are capable of in-context learning (ICL) they detect parallel structures in the pre-training data and conduct ablation experiments to study their effect on ICL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can adapt to a task with a few examples given in the prompt without any parameter update. |
Revisiting In-Context Learning with Long Context Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is a technique by which language models make predictions based on examples provided in their input context. |
| Approach: | They revisited previous studies using in-context learning techniques . they found that using a data augmentation approach, they significantly improved ICL performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves ICL performance on 18 datasets spanning 4 tasks . the proposed approach does not improve performance over a simple random sample selection method . |
What In-Context Learning “Learns” In-Context: Disentangling Task Recognition and Task Learning (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can perform in-context learning (ICL) with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not well-understood. |
| Approach: | They characterize two ways in which LLMs leverage demonstrations to solve tasks with a few demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves non-trivial performance with only TR, and TR does not improve with larger models or more demonstrations. |
In-Context Learning with Long-Context Models: An In-Depth Exploration (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning is limited by context length, but it can be used for many tasks. |
| Approach: | They study the behavior of in-context learning at an extreme context length . example retrieval shows excellent performance at low context lengths but has diminished gains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform many tasks with reasonable accuracy when a few examples are provided in-context. |