Papers for

bioinformatics tool builders

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Few-shot learning emerges similarly across diverse data types

Convergent Emergence of In-Context Learning Across Modalities

Abstract: Few-shot in-context learning (ICL), the capacity of a model to infer abstract patterns from input-output examples provided in its prompt and apply them to new inputs, has been extensively studied in large language models trained for next-token prediction on human text. Recently, few-shot ICL has been demonstrated in autoregressive genomic models as well. This raises a question: does ICL emerge broadly across domains, and if so, what common structure is shared? To address both, we develop a controlled cross-modality framework that instantiates the same task suite in a variety of modalities to test what we call the Convergent Emergence Hypothesis: the idea that few-shot ICL, when it emerges, shares a common cross-modality difficulty profile - i.e., tasks that benefit from ICL in one modality tend to benefit in others. We show that paired-mapping ICL emerges across six modalities (language, genome, integer sequences, time series, images, and proteins), surpasses controlled baselines, and has correlated per-task effects across five of them. Together, these results provide support for the Convergent Emergence Hypothesis in some modalities, but not all.

Sat 12 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Few-shot in-context learning means a model can learn a new task just by seeing a few examples in its input. The authors studied whether this ability appears in many types of data, like language, DNA, images, and music sequences. They found that this learning style does emerge in several different areas, and tasks that benefit from it in one type of data often do in others too. However, this pattern does not hold for every data type tested. This suggests a shared structure in how models learn from examples across different fields.
Open → 2609.14011v1