Pith. sign in

REVIEW 10 cited by

MetaICL: Learning to Learn In Context

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2110.15943 v2 pith:2WQDSFQN submitted 2021-10-29 cs.CL cs.AI

MetaICL: Learning to Learn In Context

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords meta-traininglearningmetaicltasksin-contexttargetapproachescontext
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

We introduce MetaICL (Meta-training for In-Context Learning), a new meta-training framework for few-shot learning where a pretrained language model is tuned to do in-context learning on a large set of training tasks. This meta-training enables the model to more effectively learn a new task in context at test time, by simply conditioning on a few training examples with no parameter updates or task-specific templates. We experiment on a large, diverse collection of tasks consisting of 142 NLP datasets including classification, question answering, natural language inference, paraphrase detection and more, across seven different meta-training/target splits. MetaICL outperforms a range of baselines including in-context learning without meta-training and multi-task learning followed by zero-shot transfer. We find that the gains are particularly significant for target tasks that have domain shifts from the meta-training tasks, and that using a diverse set of the meta-training tasks is key to improvements. We also show that MetaICL approaches (and sometimes beats) the performance of models fully finetuned on the target task, and outperforms much bigger models with nearly 8x parameters. Finally, we show that MetaICL is complementary to human-written instructions, and the best performance can be achieved by combining both approaches.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 10 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision

    cs.CL 2022-12 conditional novelty 8.0

    An unsupervised technique extracts latent yes-no knowledge from language model activations by locating a direction that satisfies logical consistency properties, outperforming zero-shot accuracy by 4% on average acros...

  2. QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs

    cs.LG 2023-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    QLoRA finetunes 4-bit quantized LLMs via LoRA adapters to match full-precision performance while using far less memory, enabling 65B-scale training on single GPUs and producing Guanaco models near ChatGPT level.

  3. STaR-Quant: State-Time Consistent Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    STaR-Quant provides a state-time consistent PTQ framework for DLLMs using SGAT and TAC to improve low-bit weight-activation quantization.

  4. Learning to Adapt: In-Context Learning Beyond Stationarity

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Gated linear attention enables lower training and test errors in non-stationary in-context learning by adaptively modulating past inputs through a learnable recency bias under an autoregressive model of task evolution.

  5. Meta-learning In-Context Enables Training-Free Cross Subject Brain Decoding

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A meta-optimized in-context learning approach enables training-free cross-subject semantic visual decoding from fMRI by inferring individual neural encoding patterns via hierarchical inference on a few examples.

  6. Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models

    cs.CL 2023-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    Repeating training data up to 4 epochs yields negligible loss increase versus unique data for fixed compute, and a new scaling law accounts for the decaying value of repeated tokens and excess parameters.

  7. ART: Automatic multi-step reasoning and tool-use for large language models

    cs.CL 2023-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ART automatically generates multi-step reasoning programs with tool integration for LLMs, yielding substantial gains over few-shot and auto-CoT prompting on BigBench and MMLU while matching hand-crafted CoT on most tasks.

  8. REPLUG: Retrieval-Augmented Black-Box Language Models

    cs.CL 2023-01 conditional novelty 6.0

    REPLUG improves frozen black-box LMs by prepending LM-supervised retrieved documents, delivering 6.3% better language modeling on GPT-3 and 5.1% better five-shot MMLU on Codex.

  9. MRKL Systems: A modular, neuro-symbolic architecture that combines large language models, external knowledge sources and discrete reasoning

    cs.CL 2022-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MRKL is a modular neuro-symbolic architecture that integrates LLMs with external knowledge and discrete reasoning to overcome limitations of pure neural language models.

  10. A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence

    cs.AI 2025-07 accept novelty 4.0

    The paper delivers the first systematic review of self-evolving agents, structured around what components evolve, when adaptation occurs, and how it is implemented.