In-Context Learning Strategies Emerge Rationally
Authors: name: Daniel Wurgaft; name: Ekdeep Singh Lubana; name: Core Francisco Park; name: Hidenori Tanaka; name: Gautam Reddy; name: Noah D. Goodman
Published: 2025-06-21 23:49:08

Abstract: Recent work analyzing in-context learning (ICL) has identified a broad set of
strategies that describe model behavior in different experimental conditions.
We aim to unify these findings by asking why a model learns these disparate
strategies in the first place. Specifically, we start with the observation that
when trained to learn a mixture of tasks, as is popular in the literature, the
strategies learned by a model for performing ICL can be captured by a family of
Bayesian predictors: a memorizing predictor, which assumes a discrete prior on
the set of seen tasks, and a generalizing predictor, where the prior matches
the underlying task distribution. Adopting the normative lens of rational
analysis, where a learner's behavior is explained as an optimal adaptation to
data given computational constraints, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian
framework that almost perfectly predicts Transformer next-token predictions
throughout training -- without assuming access to its weights. Under this
framework, pretraining is viewed as a process of updating the posterior
probability of different strategies, and inference-time behavior as a
posterior-weighted average over these strategies' predictions. Our framework
draws on common assumptions about neural network learning dynamics, which make
explicit a tradeoff between loss and complexity among candidate strategies:
beyond how well it explains the data, a model's preference towards implementing
a strategy is dictated by its complexity. This helps explain well-known ICL
phenomena, while offering novel predictions: e.g., we show a superlinear trend
in the timescale for transitioning from generalization to memorization as task
diversity increases. Overall, our work advances an explanatory and predictive
account of ICL grounded in tradeoffs between strategy loss and complexity.