arXiv Machine Learning

A Unified Framework for In-Context Learning with Causal and Masked Language Models

arXiv:2607. 04081v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a central capability of pretrained language models, yet its theoretical analysis has focused primarily on causal language models trained by left-to-right autoregressive prediction, such as GPT-style models.

arXiv AI
Sep 15

Convergent Emergence of In-Context Learning Across Modalities

The paper investigates whether few-shot in-context learning (ICL) emerges similarly across different data modalities. Using a controlled cross-modality framework, the authors test the Convergent Emergence Hypothesis, which posits that tasks benefiting from ICL in one modality will also benefit in others. They find that paired-mapping ICL appears in six modalities—language, genome, integer sequences, time series, images, and proteins—outperforming baselines and showing correlated task effects in five of them, supporting the hypothesis in some but not all cases.

By Nathan Breslow, Seungwook Han, Daniel Hyunsoo Lee, Aayush Mishra, Anqi Liu, Daniel Khashabi