On the Relation between Sensitivity and Accuracy in In-context Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chen, Yanda, Zhao, Chen, Yu, Zhou, McKeown, Kathleen, He, He
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2022
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author Chen, Yanda
Zhao, Chen
Yu, Zhou
McKeown, Kathleen
He, He
author_facet Chen, Yanda
Zhao, Chen
Yu, Zhou
McKeown, Kathleen
He, He
contents In-context learning (ICL) suffers from oversensitivity to the prompt, making it unreliable in real-world scenarios. We study the sensitivity of ICL with respect to multiple perturbation types. First, we find that label bias obscures the true sensitivity, and therefore prior work may have significantly underestimated ICL sensitivity. Second, we observe a strong negative correlation between ICL sensitivity and accuracy: predictions sensitive to perturbations are less likely to be correct. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textsc{SenSel}, a few-shot selective prediction method that abstains from sensitive predictions. Experiments on ten classification datasets show that \textsc{SenSel} consistently outperforms two commonly used confidence-based and entropy-based baselines on abstention decisions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2209_07661
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Relation between Sensitivity and Accuracy in In-context Learning
Chen, Yanda
Zhao, Chen
Yu, Zhou
McKeown, Kathleen
He, He
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
In-context learning (ICL) suffers from oversensitivity to the prompt, making it unreliable in real-world scenarios. We study the sensitivity of ICL with respect to multiple perturbation types. First, we find that label bias obscures the true sensitivity, and therefore prior work may have significantly underestimated ICL sensitivity. Second, we observe a strong negative correlation between ICL sensitivity and accuracy: predictions sensitive to perturbations are less likely to be correct. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textsc{SenSel}, a few-shot selective prediction method that abstains from sensitive predictions. Experiments on ten classification datasets show that \textsc{SenSel} consistently outperforms two commonly used confidence-based and entropy-based baselines on abstention decisions.
title On the Relation between Sensitivity and Accuracy in In-context Learning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07661