Beyond Prediction: A Component-Level Study of Concept Recovery in In-Context Learning

Abstract

In-context learning (ICL) enables language models to make accurate predictions from demonstrations, but prediction success alone does not reveal the extent to which the underlying concept has been recovered. Existing evaluations typically assess recovery at the level of the whole concept, making it difficult to identify which components are recovered and to separate model limitations from ambiguity in the demonstrations. We introduce a component-level framework for concept recovery that decomposes concepts into their defining components and uses controlled structural interventions to evaluate both component-level and whole-concept recovery under identifiable demonstrations. Across four instruction-tuned LLMs and three composition forms, we find that models often achieve high prediction accuracy despite poor whole-concept recovery, with systematic over-specification of relevant attributes and level constraints. Individual structural components are generally insufficient for whole-concept recovery, whereas jointly specifying complementary components, particularly relevant attributes and their level constraints, substantially improves recovery. However, this improvement is fragile: a single plausible but unnecessary level constraint can substantially disrupt recovery. Finally, joint supervision of recovery and implicit prediction substantially improves recovery while preserving prediction performance, with the learned capability transferring across composition forms. Overall, our component-level analysis provides a more diagnostic view of what models recover from demonstrations than the existing holistic view.