Language Model Crossover: Variation through Few-Shot Prompting

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Meyerson, Elliot, Nelson, Mark J., Bradley, Herbie, Gaier, Adam, Moradi, Arash, Hoover, Amy K., Lehman, Joel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Meyerson, Elliot
Nelson, Mark J.
Bradley, Herbie
Gaier, Adam
Moradi, Arash
Hoover, Amy K.
Lehman, Joel
author_facet Meyerson, Elliot
Nelson, Mark J.
Bradley, Herbie
Gaier, Adam
Moradi, Arash
Hoover, Amy K.
Lehman, Joel
contents This paper pursues the insight that language models naturally enable an intelligent variation operator similar in spirit to evolutionary crossover. In particular, language models of sufficient scale demonstrate in-context learning, i.e. they can learn from associations between a small number of input patterns to generate outputs incorporating such associations (also called few-shot prompting). This ability can be leveraged to form a simple but powerful variation operator, i.e. to prompt a language model with a few text-based genotypes (such as code, plain-text sentences, or equations), and to parse its corresponding output as those genotypes' offspring. The promise of such language model crossover (which is simple to implement and can leverage many different open-source language models) is that it enables a simple mechanism to evolve semantically-rich text representations (with few domain-specific tweaks), and naturally benefits from current progress in language models. Experiments in this paper highlight the versatility of language-model crossover, through evolving binary bit-strings, sentences, equations, text-to-image prompts, and Python code. The conclusion is that language model crossover is a promising method for evolving genomes representable as text.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_12170
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Language Model Crossover: Variation through Few-Shot Prompting
Meyerson, Elliot
Nelson, Mark J.
Bradley, Herbie
Gaier, Adam
Moradi, Arash
Hoover, Amy K.
Lehman, Joel
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
This paper pursues the insight that language models naturally enable an intelligent variation operator similar in spirit to evolutionary crossover. In particular, language models of sufficient scale demonstrate in-context learning, i.e. they can learn from associations between a small number of input patterns to generate outputs incorporating such associations (also called few-shot prompting). This ability can be leveraged to form a simple but powerful variation operator, i.e. to prompt a language model with a few text-based genotypes (such as code, plain-text sentences, or equations), and to parse its corresponding output as those genotypes' offspring. The promise of such language model crossover (which is simple to implement and can leverage many different open-source language models) is that it enables a simple mechanism to evolve semantically-rich text representations (with few domain-specific tweaks), and naturally benefits from current progress in language models. Experiments in this paper highlight the versatility of language-model crossover, through evolving binary bit-strings, sentences, equations, text-to-image prompts, and Python code. The conclusion is that language model crossover is a promising method for evolving genomes representable as text.
title Language Model Crossover: Variation through Few-Shot Prompting
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12170