{"paper":{"title":"A Theory of Emergent In-Context Learning as Implicit Structure Induction","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Michael Hahn, Navin Goyal","submitted_at":"2023-03-14T15:24:05Z","abstract_excerpt":"Scaling large language models (LLMs) leads to an emergent capacity to learn in-context from example demonstrations. Despite progress, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon remains limited. We argue that in-context learning relies on recombination of compositional operations found in natural language data. We derive an information-theoretic bound showing how in-context learning abilities arise from generic next-token prediction when the pretraining distribution has sufficient amounts of compositional structure, under linguistically motivated assumptions. A second bound provides a theoret"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2303.07971","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2303.07971/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}