In-Context Learning (ICL) has become a cornerstone of modern LLM deployment. However, existing ICL post-training methods have a critical blind spot: they excel at extracting patterns from demonstratio...
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.
By Jack Lu, Ryan Teehan, Zhenbang Yang, Mengye Ren
The article examines whether large language models (LLMs) can effectively use representations they learn in-context to perform downstream tasks. Experiments with open‑weight LLMs on next‑token prediction and a new adaptive world modeling task reveal that these models struggle to deploy novel semantics defined in-context, even when such semantics are encoded in their latent representations. The study also shows that state‑of‑the‑art closed‑source reasoning models similarly fail to reliably leverage in‑context patterns, highlighting a gap in flexible representation usage.
By Michael A. Lepori, Tal Linzen, Ann Yuan, Katja Filippova
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...
By Guangzhi Xiong, Zhenghao He, Bohan Liu, Sanchit Sinha, Wenqian Ye, Aidong Zhang
arXiv:2609.00759v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly handle in-context learning (ICL) tasks where a long, novel context defines the rules, knowledge, and output s...
By Jinhu Qi, Minda Hu, Wentao Zhang, Weiqiang Jin, Yanyu Chen, Junli Wang, Irwin King
arXiv:2607. 23804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context attribution methods for large language models (LLMs) identify which input context contributes to the model response.
By Quoc-Huy Trinh, Lin Zhu, Sebastian Szyller
arXiv:2604. 27660v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many real-world tasks require language models (LMs) to reason over complex contexts that exceed their parametric knowledge.
By Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Yu Lei, Qingyi Wang, Dingwei Chen, Zhitong Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Kangyang Luo, Zheng Wang, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Maosong Sun
arXiv:2606. 29407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There has been increasing interest in exploring the capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) in the field of information extraction (IE), specifically focusing on tasks related to named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE).
By Xiao You, Tianwei Yan, Shan Zhao
arXiv:2607. 09794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Context learning is an emerging inference-time task where LLMs must learn and apply novel, task-specific knowledge from intricate contexts absent from pre-training; even frontier models score under 24% task success.
By Jike Zhong, Ming Li, Yuxiang Lai, Ziyan Yang, Jingyu Xie, Jihyung Kil, Zheda Mai, Shao-Yuan Lo, Ren Xiang, Konstantinos Psounis, Yuanyuan Lei
arXiv:2601.03199v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) have shown strong potential for general natural language tasks with in-context examples. Existing In-Context...
By Yang Li, Han Meng, Chenan Wang, Zhenyu Bi, Xuan Wang, Haipeng Chen
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.
By Minglai Yang, Xinyu Guo, Renxiong Wang, Sunjie Hou, Daniel Yue Zhang, Yunzhong He
arXiv:2607. 02575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models can perform new tasks without parameter updates through in-context learning (ICL), whose core mechanism is utilizing the support set for task induction.
By Kaiyun Yang, Ruilin Yang, Zhimin Yao, J. Wang, Wei Ge