arXiv Machine Learning

How Does the Pretraining Distribution Shape In-Context Learning? A Fundamental Trade-Off

arXiv:2510. 01163v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The factors driving the performance of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remain poorly understood despite ICL's surprising effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

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.

By Chenrui Liu, Chuanlong Xie, Falong Tan, Yicheng Zeng, Lixing Zhu
arXiv AI
Jul 28

Extracting Algorithms in Pre-trained LLMs: A Case on Hidden Markov Models

arXiv:2607. 22646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) display a striking ability to predict next observations from Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) via in-context learning (ICL), but the algorithm underlying this capability remains undetermined: prior work has proposed several candidates without consensus, and none has been grounded in the model's internal activations.

By Yijia Dai, Zhaolin Gao, Yahya Sattar, Jennifer J. Sun, Sarah Dean