2026
How Few-Shot Examples Add Up: A Causal Decomposition of Function Vectors in In-Context Learning
ICML 2026poster
In-context learning (ICL) excels at new tasks from minimal examples, yet we still lack a mechanistic explanation of how few-shot prompts shape a model’s function vector (FV)--a causal activation direction that drives task behavior on the ICL query. Across tasks and models, an $n$-shot FV is well-app…