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1. Dual Operating Modes of In-Context Learning

   Lin, Ziqian; Lee, Kangwook (July 2024, Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning)

   In-context learning (ICL) exhibits dual operating modes: task learning, i.e., acquiring a new skill from in-context samples, and task retrieval, i.e., locating and activating a relevant pretrained skill. Recent theoretical work proposes various mathematical models to analyze ICL, but they cannot fully explain the duality. In this work, we analyze a generalized probabilistic model for pretraining data, obtaining a quantitative understanding of the two operating modes of ICL. Leveraging our analysis, we provide the first explanation of an unexplained phenomenon observed with real-world large language models (LLMs). Under some settings, the ICL risk initially increases and then decreases with more in-context examples. Our analysis offers a plausible explanation for this "early ascent" phenomenon: a limited number of in-context samples may lead to the retrieval of an incorrect skill, thereby increasing the risk, which will eventually diminish as task learning takes effect with more in-context samples. We also analyze ICL with biased labels, e.g., zero-shot ICL, where in-context examples are assigned random labels, and predict the bounded efficacy of such approaches. We corroborate our analysis and predictions with extensive experiments with Transformers and LLMs. 

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2. PRODIGY: Enabling In-context Learning Over Graphs

   Huang, Qian; Ren, Hongyu; Chen, Peng; Krzmanc, Gregor; Zeng, Daniel; Liang, Percy; Leskovec, Jure (December 2023, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   In-context learning is the ability of a pretrained model to adapt to novel and diverse downstream tasks by conditioning on prompt examples, without optimizing any parameters. While large language models have demonstrated this ability, how in-context learning could be performed over graphs is unexplored. In this paper, we develop Pretraining Over Diverse In-Context Graph Systems (PRODIGY), the first pretraining framework that enables in-context learning over graphs. The key idea of our framework is to formulate in-context learning over graphs with a novel prompt graph representation, which connects prompt examples and queries. We then propose a graph neural network architecture over the prompt graph and a corresponding family of in-context pretraining objectives. With PRODIGY, the pre- trained model can directly perform novel downstream classification tasks on unseen graphs via in-context learning. We provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of our framework by showcasing its strong in-context learning performance on tasks involving citation networks and knowledge graphs. Our approach outperforms the in-context learning accuracy of contrastive pretraining baselines with hard-coded adaptation by 18% on average across all setups. Moreover, it also outperforms standard finetuning with limited data by 33% on average with in-context learning. 

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3. Mission Impossible: A Statistical Perspective on Jailbreaking LLMs

   Su, Jingtong; Kempe, Julia; Ullrich, Karen (July 2024, International Conference on Machine Learning 2024)

   Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a deluge of text data with limited quality control. As a result, LLMs can exhibit unintended or even harmful behaviours, such as leaking information, fake news or hate speech. Countermeasures, commonly referred to as preference alignment, include fine-tuning the pretrained LLMs with carefully crafted text examples of desired behaviour. Even then, empirical evidence shows preference aligned LLMs can be enticed to harmful behaviour. This so called jailbreaking of LLMs is typically achieved by adversarially modifying the input prompt to the LLM. Our paper provides theoretical insights into the phenomenon of preference alignment and jailbreaking from a statistical perspective. Under our framework, we first show that pretrained LLMs will mimic harmful behaviour if present in the training corpus. \textbf{Under that same framework, we then introduce a statistical notion of alignment, and lower-bound the jailbreaking probability, showing that it is unpreventable under reasonable assumptions.} 

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4. Task Descriptors Help Transformers Learn Linear Models In-Context

   Huang, Ruomin; Ge, Rong (April 2025, ICLR 2025)

   Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong in-context learning (ICL) ability, which allows the model to make predictions on new examples based on the given prompt. Recently, a line of research (Von Oswald et al., 2023; Aky¨urek et al., 2023; Ahn et al., 2023; Mahankali et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2024) considered ICL for a simple linear regression setting and showed that the forward pass of Transformers is simulating some variants of gradient descent (GD) algorithms on the in-context examples. In practice, the input prompt usually contains a task descriptor in addition to in-context examples. We investigate how the task description helps ICL in the linear regression setting. Consider a simple setting where the task descriptor describes the mean of input in linear regression. Our results show that gradient flow converges to a global minimum for a linear Transformer. At the global minimum, the Transformer learns to use the task descriptor effectively to improve its performance. Empirically, we verify our results by showing that the weights converge to the predicted global minimum and Transformers indeed perform better with task descriptors. 

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5. In-Context Continual Learning Assisted by an External Continual Learner

   Momeni, Saleh; Mazumder, Sahisnu; Ke, Zixuan; Liu, Bing (January 2025, The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-2025))

   Existing continual learning (CL) methods mainly rely on fine-tuning or adapting large language mod- els (LLMs). They still suffer from catastrophic for- getting (CF). Little work has been done to exploit in-context learning (ICL) to leverage the extensive knowledge within LLMs for CL without updating any parameters. However, incrementally learning each new task in ICL necessitates adding training examples from each class of the task to the prompt, which hampers scalability as the prompt length in- creases. This issue not only leads to excessively long prompts that exceed the input token limit of the underlying LLM but also degrades the model’s performance due to the overextended context. To address this, we introduce InCA, a novel approach that integrates an external continual learner (ECL) with ICL to enable scalable CL without CF. The ECL is built incrementally to pre-select a small subset of likely classes for each test instance. By restricting the ICL prompt to only these selected classes, InCA prevents prompt lengths from becom- ing excessively long, while maintaining high per- formance. Experimental results demonstrate that InCA significantly outperforms existing CL base- lines, achieving substantial performance gains. 

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