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FoundationsPrompting Updated 2026

In-Context Learning

A model's ability to learn a task from examples or instructions placed in the prompt at inference time, without any change to its weights.

In-context learning is the emergent behaviour Brown et al. (2020) observed in GPT-3: shown a few examples in the prompt, the model performs the task without gradient updates. The survey by Dong et al. (2022) catalogues how it works and what makes it reliable.

It is what makes prompting, few-shot examples and chain-of-thought effective — and why a single frozen model can do so many different jobs.

References

Primary, peer-reviewed and archival sources for this definition.

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., et al. (2020). Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020).
A Survey on In-context Learning
Dong, Q., Li, L., Dai, D., Zheng, C., Ma, J., et al. (2022). arXiv preprint (later EMNLP 2024).

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

MultipleChat. "In-Context Learning." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/in-context-learning

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