Looped linear transformers with LN provably converge via GD to implement the power method on principal component prediction.
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A Survey on In-context Learning
Canonical reference. 93% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
abstract
With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It has been a significant trend to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress and challenges of ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques, including training strategies, prompt designing strategies, and related analysis. Additionally, we explore various ICL application scenarios, such as data engineering and knowledge updating. Finally, we address the challenges of ICL and suggest potential directions for further research. We hope that our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL.
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- abstract With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It has been a significant trend to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress and challenges of ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques, including training strategies, prompt des
co-cited works
representative citing papers
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DICE formalizes multi-agent LLM coordination as discounted incomplete-information Markov games and introduces Heterogeneous Quantal Response Equilibrium (HQRE) to achieve unique stable equilibria with bounded regret, demonstrated via prompt-control and fine-tuning algorithms on eleven benchmarks.
VASO is a verification-guided self-evolution framework for LLM robot skill contracts that reaches 97.2% formal-specification compliance on Jackal and quadcopter tasks using under 100 samples.
WALDO reformulates zero-shot anomaly localisation as comparative inference using entropy-weighted Sliced Wasserstein distances for reference selection and Goldilocks zone sampling, achieving 19% relative mAP@30 improvement on the NOVA brain MRI benchmark.
Pro²Assist uses multimodal egocentric perception from AR glasses to track fine-grained progress in long-horizon procedural tasks and deliver timely proactive assistance, outperforming baselines by over 21% in action understanding and up to 2.29x in timing accuracy.
AnchorSeg uses ordered query banks of latent reasoning tokens plus a spatial anchor token and a Token-Mask Cycle Consistency loss to achieve 67.7% gIoU and 68.1% cIoU on the ReasonSeg benchmark.
DeformPIC deforms query point clouds under prompt guidance for in-context learning, outperforming prior methods with lower Chamfer Distance on reconstruction, denoising, and registration tasks.
A new dataset and nine-metric majority-vote procedure show that existing code-reasoning benchmarks are dominated by lower-complexity problems that do not reflect real-world code.
ProAgent uses on-demand tiered perception and context-aware LLM reasoning to deliver proactive assistance on AR glasses, achieving up to 27.7% higher prediction accuracy and 20.5% lower false detections than baselines.
CREST-Search is a red-teaming framework that crafts seemingly benign search queries to induce unsafe citations from web-augmented LLMs, backed by a new WebSearch-Harm dataset for fine-tuning a specialized attacker model.
SITE applies soft gradient-based head selection to inject ICL-derived task embeddings, outperforming prior embedding adaptation and few-shot ICL across generation, reasoning, and NLU tasks on 12 LLMs from 4B to 70B parameters.
One training example via RLVR boosts LLM math reasoning from 17.6% to 35.7% average across six benchmarks.
CodeMind evaluates ten LLMs on four benchmarks using three new code reasoning tasks, finding performance varies by model size and drops with complexity while showing no correlation with bug repair ability.
Set-of-Mark prompting marks segmented image regions with alphanumerics and masks to let GPT-4V achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot results on referring expression comprehension and segmentation benchmarks like RefCOCOg.
BCL introduces a particle-filtering Bayesian update framework to systematically refine label representations in in-context learning for information extraction, claiming consistent gains over prior methods.
Traj-Evolve combines non-parametric experience retrieval and multi-agent RL with a leave-one-out unification strategy to outperform baselines on lung cancer prediction from up to five years of multimodal EHRs, including in never-smokers.
CDS-trained BabyLMs show earlier and more appropriate production in a new frame-completion task while FineWeb-edu models lead on comprehension benchmarks, indicating current tests underestimate CDS benefits.
TCFDNet uses a Gait Modality Text Dictionary from LLMs, CLIP alignment, and text-guided disentanglement modules to achieve SOTA cross-modal gait recognition on SUSTech1K and FreeGait.
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LLMs show instruction-following rates from 1% to 99% when instructions conflict with hardcoded pattern demonstrations, with output diversity as the main predictor of resistance.
METIS internalizes curriculum judgment in LLM reinforcement fine-tuning by predicting within-prompt reward variance via in-context learning and jointly optimizing with a self-judgment reward, yielding superior performance and up to 67% faster convergence across math, code, and agent benchmarks.
Introduces Personal VCL formalization and benchmark revealing LMM context gaps, plus an Agentic Context Bank baseline that boosts personalized visual reasoning.
Decompose and Recompose decomposes seen robotic demonstrations into skill-action alignments and recomposes them via visual-semantic retrieval and planning to enable zero-shot cross-task generalization.
citing papers explorer
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Deformation-based In-Context Learning for Point Cloud Understanding
DeformPIC deforms query point clouds under prompt guidance for in-context learning, outperforming prior methods with lower Chamfer Distance on reconstruction, denoising, and registration tasks.
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Internalizing Curriculum Judgment for LLM Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
METIS internalizes curriculum judgment in LLM reinforcement fine-tuning by predicting within-prompt reward variance via in-context learning and jointly optimizing with a self-judgment reward, yielding superior performance and up to 67% faster convergence across math, code, and agent benchmarks.
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Personal Visual Context Learning in Large Multimodal Models
Introduces Personal VCL formalization and benchmark revealing LMM context gaps, plus an Agentic Context Bank baseline that boosts personalized visual reasoning.
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Decompose and Recompose: Reasoning New Skills from Existing Abilities for Cross-Task Robotic Manipulation
Decompose and Recompose decomposes seen robotic demonstrations into skill-action alignments and recomposes them via visual-semantic retrieval and planning to enable zero-shot cross-task generalization.
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From Context to Skills: Can Language Models Learn from Context Skillfully?
Ctx2Skill uses a self-evolving multi-agent loop with Challenger, Reasoner, Judge, and Cross-time Replay to discover context-specific skills, improving task-solving rates on CL-bench benchmarks across models.
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RAQG-QPP: Query Performance Prediction with Retrieved Query Variants and Retrieval Augmented Query Generation
Retrieved query variants from logs combined with LLM-augmented generation improve unsupervised QPP accuracy by up to 30% for neural rankers on TREC DL'19 and DL'20.
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Measuring Representation Robustness in Large Language Models for Geometry
LLMs display accuracy gaps of up to 14 percentage points on the same geometry problems solely due to representation choice, with vector forms consistently weakest and a convert-then-solve prompt helping only high-capacity models.
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Memory in the LLM Era: Modular Architectures and Strategies in a Unified Framework
A unified framework for LLM agent memory is benchmarked, with a new hybrid method outperforming state-of-the-art on standard tasks.
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Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners
Generative video models exhibit emergent zero-shot capabilities across perception, manipulation, and basic reasoning tasks.
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LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code
LiveCodeBench collects 400 recent contest problems to create a contamination-free benchmark evaluating LLMs on code generation and related capabilities like self-repair and execution.
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When Context Sticks: Studying Interference in In-Context Learning
In-context learning shows persistent interference from prior examples, with more misleading linear examples degrading quadratic predictions and training curricula modulating recovery speed.
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Consistency Analysis of Sentiment Predictions using Syntactic & Semantic Context Assessment Summarization (SSAS)
SSAS improves LLM sentiment prediction consistency and data quality by up to 30% on three review datasets via syntactic and semantic context assessment summarization.
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Leveraging Weighted Syntactic and Semantic Context Assessment Summary (wSSAS) Towards Text Categorization Using LLMs
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Large Language Model-Brained GUI Agents: A Survey
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Network Edge Inference for Large Language Models: Principles, Techniques, and Opportunities
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Towards Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Reinforced Reasoning with Large Language Models
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Recent Advances in Multimodal Affective Computing: An NLP Perspective
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A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation
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Data-Centric Foundation Models in Computational Healthcare: A Survey
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A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models
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