fv-portability-across-20-templates

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/todd-2023-function-vectors-s0-abstract-chunk-1.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:40+00:00

Function Vectors extracted from in-context learning demonstrations reliably trigger task execution in zero-shot prompts, natural text completions, and 20 different ICL templates.

Summary

The learned "how to do this task" signal pulled from one worked example travels reliably across completely different prompt styles, whether you phrase the request as a bare instruction, a sentence to finish, or one of 20 structured few-shot layouts. This matters because it means the system doesn't need a separate, carefully tuned prompt for each interaction format; one extracted capability can drive the same behavior everywhere, making the approach far more robust and easier to deploy.