Research suggests LLM in-context learning stems from specific pre-training data
JoshPurtell · x · 2026-08-26
The author replies that some research papers suggest LLMs derive their in-context learning (ICL) ability from specific kinds of data in web pre-training. If you ablate this data, the model loses ICL. This implies ICL is not just an emergent property of generic next-token prediction but relies on specific patterns in the training data.
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