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.
arXiv:2605. 28854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable flexibility in adapting to novel tasks from in-context examples without parameter updates, a capability known as in-context learning (ICL).
arXiv:2609.34187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The strong version of the stochastic parrot argument claims that, although large language models (LLMs) may exceed rote regurgitation, they c...
arXiv:2609.36788v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Incorporating rich task-relevant context, such as domain knowledge and external observations, is a key capability yet remains challenging for Bayesian...
arXiv:2607. 06160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthesizing long-context supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data is a scalable way to enhance the long-context understanding of large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches share three limitations: narrow task coverage, insufficient instruction difficulty, and a lack of faithfulness supervision.
arXiv:2510. 20535v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation or chain-of-thought reasoning have led to longer contexts and increased inference costs.
The paper introduces LongHarness Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate both the effectiveness and efficiency of language model harnesses for long-context reasoning. It features tasks that require diverse retrieval strategies—such as lexical search and semantic matching—and strategic, adaptive reasoning over global and local context, with only a small subset of the context being useful at each step. Evaluations across multiple state‑of‑the‑art models and harnesses show that even strong combinations achieve only 68% macro‑average accuracy, and that the same model can vary markedly in efficiency depending on the harness used.
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.
arXiv:2507. 05019v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates.
The paper proposes that large language models (LLMs) encode high‑level concepts as linear directions within their activation space and that they can use subspaces and vector algebra to perform tasks. By analyzing functional modules and residual streams during in‑context learning (ICL), the authors find that LLMs can create evidence‑accumulating subspaces and solve ICL tasks through simple algebraic operations within those subspaces.
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...
arXiv:2608. 01672v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective long-context modeling is not merely about retaining more of the past, but about preserving the information that may prove relevant later.
arXiv:2606. 30704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel across a wide range of tasks, yet their instance-specific solutions often lack the structural consistency needed for reliable deployment.