Instruction learning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled zero-shot task generalization. However, instruction learning has been predominantly approached as a fine-tuning problem, including instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback, where LLMs are multi-task fine-tuned on various tasks with instructions. In this paper, we present a surprising finding that applying in-context learning to instruction learning, referred to as In-Context Instruction Learning (ICIL), significantly improves the zero-shot task generalization performance for both pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned models. One of the core advantages of ICIL is that it uses a single fixed prompt to evaluate all tasks, which is a concatenation of cross-task demonstrations. In particular, we demonstrate that the most powerful instruction-fine-tuned baseline (text-davinci-003) also benefits from ICIL by 9.3%, indicating that the effect of ICIL is complementary to instructionbased fine-tuning 2 . * Work done while interning at LG AI Research. 2 All experiments are reproducible from github.com/seonghyeonye/ICIL. Preprint. Under review.