Organizations: University of California, Los Angeles · 2National Taiwan University · 3Texas A&M University · 4NVIDIA AI Technology Center · 5Arena Intelligence Inc
In-context learning (ICL) enables models to infer tasks from demonstrations, but existing benchmarks generally lack matched text and image versions needed to compare ICL performance across modalities. We introduce TwinICL, a procedurally generated benchmark providing such pairs for controlled comparison. Across six open-weight models and 38 tasks, multimodal ICL consistently underperforms text-only ICL, with gaps varying by task family. To test whether this gap can be recovered, we target visual access, task framing, and reasoning through three interventions. Their combination recovers strong multimodal ICL performance on a diagnostic subset, despite limited or inconsistent individual effects. To distinguish difficulties in executing tasks from those in inferring them, we evaluate models with explicit task instructions, revealing a modality gap even when the task is known. We then examine how adding demonstration inputs and outputs reshapes this gap, highlighting demonstrations' dual role as additional context to process and evidence about the task. The dataset is available at https://github.com/lab-flair/TwinICL.
In-context learning (ICL) enables fast task adaptation from demonstrations without per-task parameter updates but remains highly sensitive to example selection and formatting. In unified multimodal models spanning understanding and generation, this sensitivity is exacerbated by cross-modal interference and varying cognitive demands. Consequently, in-context learning efficacy is often non-monotonic and highly task-dependent. To diagnose these behaviors, we introduce a six-level Capability-Oriented Taxonomy that categorizes the functional role of demonstrations from basic perception to high-order discernment. Guided by this cognitive framework, we construct UniICL-760K, a large-scale corpus featuring curated 8-shot in-context learning episodes across 15 subtasks, alongside UniICL-Bench for rigorous, controlled evaluation. We show that this data-driven assembly is the primary source of our gains. As a complementary, lightweight stabilizer, we additionally propose the Context-Adaptive Prototype Modulator, a plug-and-play module that further improves few-shot stability. Evaluations on UniICL-Bench show that our approach yields highly competitive unified results, outperforming larger-parameter multimodal large language model baselines on most understanding in-context learning tasks. Data and code are available at https://github.com/xuyicheng-zju/UniICL.
Multimodal In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a practical inference paradigm for Multimodal Large Language Models, where a small set of interleaved image-text In-Context Demonstrations (ICDs) conditions the model to solve new tasks. Despite its flexibility, multimodal ICL incurs high inference latency and suffers from instability due to sensitivity to demonstration formatting, ordering, and content. To address these limitations, we propose Hyper-ICL, a lightweight, training-based framework for demonstration-free multimodal ICL that reconstructs demonstration effects directly without requiring ICDs at inference time. Hyper-ICL learns a parameter-efficient low-rank logit-level adapter that calibrates attention distributions to better match demonstration-induced attention redistribution. To capture how demonstration influence varies across queries, we introduce a query-adaptive modulation mechanism that adaptively controls intervention strength at token level across layers and heads based on the current query. Finally, we propose a layer-wise hyperbolic anchor distillation loss that aligns intermediate student features to a demonstration-conditioned teacher via Lorentz geodesic distance. This loss encourages the student to reconstruct the demonstration-query relationships induced by ICDs. Extensive experiments across six different multimodal benchmarks (including VQAv2, OK-VQA, and COCO Caption) demonstrate that Hyper-ICL consistently improves accuracy and stability over vanilla ICL and existing state-of-the-art methods.
We introduce MMCL-Bench, a benchmark for multimodal context learning: learning task-local rules, procedures, and empirical patterns from visual or mixed-modality teaching context and applying them to new visual instances. Unlike text-only context learning or standard multimodal question answering, this setting requires models to recover and localize relevant evidence from images, screenshots, manuals, videos, and frame sequences before they can reason over the learned context. MMCL-Bench contains 102 tasks spanning three categories: rule system application, procedural task execution, and empirical discovery and induction. We evaluate frontier multimodal models with strict rubric-based scoring and find that current systems remain far from robust multimodal context learning, with even the strongest model solving fewer than one-third of tasks under strict evaluation. Diagnostic ablations and error analysis show that failures arise throughout the context-to-answer pipeline, including context anchoring, visual evidence extraction, context reasoning, and response construction. MMCL-Bench thus highlights multimodal context learning as an important unsolved capability bottleneck for current multimodal models.