The paper investigates when in‑context learning (ICL) can succeed even if the instruction or target task is not covered by a model’s pretraining data. It introduces a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of distribution shift—unsupported instructions and unsupported target tasks—and shows how demonstrations can mitigate these shifts. The authors further extend the analysis to long‑horizon tasks that can be decomposed into pretraining‑supported subtasks, providing error bounds that explain how ICL can handle tasks beyond the model’s original support.
arXiv:2610.01054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) enables language models to perform new tasks from demonstrations without weight updates. However, every ICL inference requi...
The paper introduces iAmTime, a time‑series foundation model that uses instruction‑conditioned in‑context learning to adapt to tasks at inference time. iAmTime represents each episode as a structured prompt with semantic tokens that focus on specific time‑series regions, enabling the model to infer task structure from input‑output demonstrations. Trained on large real and synthetic corpora across forecasting, imputation, reconstruction, classification, anomaly detection, and source de‑mixing, iAmTime outperforms strong baselines on zero‑shot probabilistic and point forecasting while matching or exceeding performance on several non‑forecasting tasks.
The study investigates how language models acquire in-context learning (ICL) by distinguishing between copying a nearby demonstration and integrating information across a prompt. Across 17 models, roughly one-third default to copied answers, a few are undecided, and the remainder favor rule-consistent answers that yield higher accuracy and are guided by the requested value rather than the nearest conflicting example. Analyses show that models prioritize task-relevant prompt tokens before accuracy surpasses chance, and that synthetic or fine-tuned training can shift models toward compositional responses or improve accuracy when prompts reassign label meanings.
arXiv:2610.01712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) enables a pretrained model to infer a task from demonstrations without updating its parameters. While much of the existing...
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.
The paper introduces CIG‑SFT, a supervised fine‑tuning method that uses conditional information gain to evaluate how much each demonstrated token reduces uncertainty about the task. By comparing token likelihoods from a frozen reference model with and without task input, the method derives a KL‑regularized projection of the current policy, yielding a scalar‑weighted SFT objective whose gradients match the projected target. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that CIG‑SFT outperforms standard SFT and adaptive fine‑tuning baselines, especially in generalizing to challenging evaluation distributions, without requiring extra data or online rollouts.
TwinICL is a procedurally generated benchmark that pairs matched text and image versions of tasks to enable controlled comparison of in‑context learning (ICL) across modalities. Experiments on six open‑weight models and 38 tasks show that multimodal ICL consistently underperforms text‑only ICL, with varying gaps by task family. Interventions targeting visual access, task framing, and reasoning can recover strong multimodal performance on a diagnostic subset, yet a modality gap remains even when explicit task instructions are provided, highlighting the dual role of demonstrations as context and evidence.
The paper introduces AVA, a training‑free framework that improves interleaved multimodal in‑context learning for frozen large vision‑language models. AVA decomposes the interleaved context into per‑sample threads, selects influential demonstrations while removing redundancy, and calibrates consistency using a weak sibling model’s confidence. Across five vision‑language benchmarks, AVA raises performance by up to 2.4 points, narrows the visual performance gap on ScienceQA‑IMG, and remains robust even with 30% noisy demonstrations, all while keeping the LVLM frozen and adding only modest latency.
arXiv:2609.38149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer language models (LMs) are feed-forward: deep-layer representations are never fed back to shallower layers, and the only pathway for informa...
arXiv:2609.37250v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action models (WAMs) couple future visual-state prediction with action generation. By adapting video generators or image-editing models pretrai...
arXiv:2507. 04221v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Context Tuning, a simple and effective method to significantly enhance few-shot adaptation of large language models (LLMs) without weight updates.
arXiv:2606. 09396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is an efficient approach for downstream task adaptation and often serves as the initialization stage for reinforcement learning (RL), but it can show weaker generalization than RL.