How In-Context Learning Emerges from Training on Unstructured Data: On the Role of Co-Occurrence, Positional Information, and Noise Structures

LLMs like transformers have impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities; they can generate predictions for new queries based on input-output sequences in prompts without parameter updates. While many theories have attempted to explain ICL, they often focus on structured training data similar to ICL tasks, such as regression. In practice, however, these models are trained in an unsupervised manner on unstructured text data, which bears little resemblance to ICL tasks. To this end, we investigate how ICL emerges from unsupervised training on unstructured data. The key observation is that ICL can arise simply by modeling co-occurrence information using classical language models like continuous bag of words (CBOW), which we theoretically prove and empirically validate. Furthermore, we establish the necessity of positional information and noise structure to generalize ICL to unseen data. Finally, we present instances where ICL fails and provide theoretical explanations; they suggest that the ICL ability of LLMs to identify certain tasks can be sensitive to the structure of the training data.