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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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.
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.
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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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citing papers explorer
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Evaluating Code Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models Under Real-World Settings
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.
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ProAgent: Harnessing On-Demand Sensory Contexts for Proactive LLM Agent Systems in the Wild
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.
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When Search Goes Wrong: Red-Teaming Web-Augmented Large Language Models
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.
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Soft Head Selection for Injecting ICL-Derived Task Embeddings
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.
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Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example
One training example via RLVR boosts LLM math reasoning from 17.6% to 35.7% average across six benchmarks.
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A Rule-Aware Prompt Framework for Structured Numeric Reasoning in Cyber-Physical Systems
A rule-aware modular prompt framework enables LLMs to perform structured numeric reasoning on power grid data by separating rules from normalized deviations, improving anomaly detection consistency and reducing token use in IEEE 118-bus tests.
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SnapAudit: Active Auditing of Differentially Private In-Context Learning via Snapshot-Based Simulation
SnapAudit decomposes DP-ICL into a deterministic snapshot stage and a stochastic noise stage, using bootstrap simulation to achieve 80-200x faster auditing and exposing privacy bound violations in existing Gaussian and embedding mechanisms.
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Localizing Task Recognition and Task Learning in In-Context Learning via Attention Head Analysis
A new framework using Task Subspace Logit Attribution localizes attention heads specialized for task recognition and task learning in in-context learning, showing they align and rotate hidden states within a task subspace.
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Artificial Phantasia: Emergent Mental Imagery in Large Language Models
LLMs achieve higher accuracy than humans on compositional imagery tasks previously argued to require pictorial representations, supporting emergent propositional mental imagery in AI.
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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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BugScope: Learn to Find Bugs Like Human
BugScope structures LLM bug detection into three human-mirroring steps and distills guidelines from examples, reaching 0.87 F1 on 33 real bugs while outperforming Claude and Cursor tools and uncovering 184 new issues in production code.
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In-depth Analysis of Graph-based RAG in a Unified Framework
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Judge a Book by its Cover: Investigating Multi-Modal LLMs for Multi-Page Handwritten Document Transcription
Introduces OCR+PAGE-1 and OCR+PAGE-N prompting strategies that improve zero-shot multi-page handwritten document transcription by sharing context across pages.
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TabICL: A Tabular Foundation Model for In-Context Learning on Large Data
TabICL scales in-context learning to large tabular data via column-then-row attention for row embeddings followed by a transformer, matching TabPFNv2 speed and performance while outperforming it and CatBoost on datasets over 10K samples.
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Thinking with Video: Video Generation as a Promising Multimodal Reasoning Paradigm
Video generation models demonstrate competitive multimodal reasoning on a new benchmark, matching or exceeding VLMs on visual puzzles and achieving 92% on MATH and 69.2% on MMMU.
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Context-Guided Decompilation: A Step Towards Re-executability
ICL4Decomp applies in-context learning to guide LLMs in generating re-executable decompiled code from binaries, reporting roughly 40% higher re-executability than prior methods across datasets and optimization levels.
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Online In-Context Distillation for Low-Resource Vision Language Models
Online In-Context Distillation lets small VLMs gain up to 33% performance with as little as 4% teacher annotations by distilling knowledge through dynamic in-context demonstrations at inference.
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SSA: Improving Performance With a Better Scoring Function
Replacing Softmax with Scaled Signed Averaging in transformer attention improves generalization under distribution shifts for in-context learning and boosts results on NLP benchmarks.
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Diverse LLMs or Diverse Question Interpretations? That is the Ensembling Question
Question interpretation diversity outperforms model diversity for LLM ensembling on binary QA tasks using majority voting.
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LENS: Multi-level Evaluation of Multimodal Reasoning with Large Language Models
LENS is a new multi-level benchmark dataset for evaluating MLLMs on perception-to-reasoning tasks using the same images across all levels with recent social media content.
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Position: LLM Watermarking Should Align Stakeholders' Incentives for Practical Adoption
LLM watermarking adoption is limited by misaligned stakeholder incentives; incentive-aligned approaches such as in-context watermarking can enable practical use in targeted domains like education and peer review.
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A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence
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Towards Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Reinforced Reasoning with Large Language Models
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