Convergent Emergence of In-Context Learning Across Modalities
Controlled experiments show few-shot in-context learning emerges across six modalities including language, genomes, images, and proteins, partially supporting a convergence hypothesis.
The paper tests the Convergent Emergence Hypothesis: that few-shot in-context learning, when it emerges, shares a common cross-modality difficulty profile. A controlled framework instantiated the same task suite across six modalities: language, genome, integer sequences, time series, images, and proteins. Paired-mapping ICL emerged in all six modalities, surpassed controlled baselines, and showed correlated per-task effects in five of them, providing partial support for the hypothesis.