Rules Amortize, Pairings Don't: Linguistic Structure Determines What Latent Task Representations Can Replace In-Context Learning

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.00526v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) can be amortized into latent objects (task vectors, function vectors, context vectors) that recover few-shot behavior at zero-shot inference cost, but recent theory shows a static vector acts as a single synthetic demonstration and must fail on high-rank mappings such as word-level bijections. We ask a linguistic version of this question: which linguistic operations can be amortized out of the prompt? We train a 2.6M-par