Baturay Saglam


Fixing paper assignments

  1. Please select all papers that belong to the same person.
  2. Indicate below which author they should be assigned to.
Provide a valid ORCID iD here. This will be used to match future papers to this author.
Provide the name of the school or the university where the author has received or will receive their highest degree (e.g., Ph.D. institution for researchers, or current affiliation for students). This will be used to form the new author page ID, if needed.

TODO: "submit" and "cancel" buttons here


2025

pdf bib
Learning Task Representations from In-Context Learning
Baturay Saglam | Xinyang Hu | Zhuoran Yang | Dionysis Kalogerias | Amin Karbasi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are internally encoded and generalized remains a challenge. To address some of the empirical and technical gaps in the literature, we introduce an automated formulation for encoding task information in ICL prompts as a function of attention heads within the transformer architecture. This approach computes a single task vector as a weighted sum of attention heads, with the weights optimized causally via gradient descent. Our findings show that existing methods fail to generalize effectively to modalities beyond text. In response, we also design a benchmark to evaluate whether a task vector can preserve task fidelity in functional regression tasks. The proposed method successfully extracts task-specific information from in-context demonstrations and excels in both text and regression tasks, demonstrating its generalizability across modalities.