Is In-Context Learning a Type of Error-Driven Learning? Evidence from the Inverse Frequency Effect in Structural Priming (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained large language models have shown the capacity to perform in-context learning (ICL) this capability could provide a way to bridge the divide between language models and humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a new way of diagnosing whether ICL is error-driven learning . they simulated structural priming with ICL and found the effect was stronger . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on the inverse frequency effect (IFE) phenomenon is similar to error-driven learning in large language models . |
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| 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 . |
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In-Context Learning Creates Task Vectors (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful new learning paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model with a prompt and a query to learn a mapping based on two examples to produce the output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn functions from a simple structure based on a training set and a single task vector calculated from the training set. |
In-context Learning and Gradient Descent Revisited (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) has shown impressive results in few-shot learning tasks, yet its underlying mechanism remains elusive. |
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Learning vs Retrieval: The Role of In-Context Examples in Regression with Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on in-context learning mechanisms are not consistent . current research identifies two main approaches to explain the ICL mechanism . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluating in-context learning mechanisms by focusing on regression tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can solve regression problems and then measure the extent to which the LLM retrieves its internal knowledge versus learning from in-context examples. |
What In-Context Learning “Learns” In-Context: Disentangling Task Recognition and Task Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
What Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis. (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained large language models have exhibited an impressive ability to learn in context across various domains, e.g., code generation, education, medicine and even medicine. |
| Approach: | They taxonomize existing candidate theories into three competing hypotheses that explain LLMs’ ability to learn in context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn a task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration and generalize it to the prompt. |
Fine-tuning vs. In-context Learning in Large Language Models: A Formal Language Learning Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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Bishwamittra Ghosh, Soumi Das, Till Speicher, Qinyuan Wu, Mohammad Aflah Khan, Deepak Garg, Krishna P. Gummadi, Evimaria Terzi
| Challenge: | Prior studies comparing FT and ICL have yielded mixed and inconclusive results due to inconsistent experimental setups. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal language learning task with precise language boundaries, controlled string sampling, and no data contamination to enable a rigorous comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task offers precise language boundaries, controlled string sampling, and no data contamination. |
Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning ability . despite the great success in performance, its working mechanism remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They explain language models as meta-optimizers and understand in-context learning as implicit finetuning . they find that Transformer attention has a dual form of gradient descent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict labels for unseen inputs without parameter updates . the proposed model outperforms smaller models with a single parameter update . |
ICLEval: Evaluating In-Context Learning Ability of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| 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. |
Understanding In-Context Learning via Supportive Pretraining Data (2023.acl-long)
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| 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. |