arXiv AI

When Context Misleads: In-context Learning with Jurisdiction in Large Language Models

The paper "When Context Misleads: In-context Learning with Jurisdiction in Large Language Models" introduces FakeContextBench, a benchmark of pseudoscientific claims across seven domains to test large language models’ ability to judge whether contextual information should dictate the answer. Experiments show that both commercial and open‑source models struggle with context authority and that standard ICL fine‑tuning can worsen susceptibility to misleading context. The authors propose Jurisdiction In‑Context Learning (J‑ICL), a post‑training framework that adds context validation to the objective, which improves benchmark scores and reality accuracy by significant margins over baseline models.

arXiv AI
Oct 16

Language Models Struggle to Use Representations Learned In-Context

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 AI
Jul 14

Agentic Context Learning with Self-Discovered Specification

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 Machine Learning
Oct 15

From Copying to Composition: How Language Models Develop In-Context Learning

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