Dynamic Demonstrations Controller for In-Context Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhao, Fei, Pang, Taotian, Wu, Zhen, Ma, Zheng, Huang, Shujian, Dai, Xinyu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Zhao, Fei
Pang, Taotian
Wu, Zhen
Ma, Zheng
Huang, Shujian
Dai, Xinyu
author_facet Zhao, Fei
Pang, Taotian
Wu, Zhen
Ma, Zheng
Huang, Shujian
Dai, Xinyu
contents In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where a large language model (LLM) observes a small number of demonstrations and a test instance as its input, and directly makes predictions without updating model parameters. Previous studies have revealed that ICL is sensitive to the selection and the ordering of demonstrations. However, there are few studies regarding the impact of the demonstration number on the ICL performance within a limited input length of LLM, because it is commonly believed that the number of demonstrations is positively correlated with model performance. In this paper, we found this conclusion does not always hold true. Through pilot experiments, we discover that increasing the number of demonstrations does not necessarily lead to improved performance. Building upon this insight, we propose a Dynamic Demonstrations Controller (D$^2$Controller), which can improve the ICL performance by adjusting the number of demonstrations dynamically. The experimental results show that D$^2$Controller yields a 4.6% relative improvement on ten different sizes of LLMs across ten datasets. Moreover, we also extend our method to previous ICL models and achieve competitive results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_00385
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dynamic Demonstrations Controller for In-Context Learning
Zhao, Fei
Pang, Taotian
Wu, Zhen
Ma, Zheng
Huang, Shujian
Dai, Xinyu
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where a large language model (LLM) observes a small number of demonstrations and a test instance as its input, and directly makes predictions without updating model parameters. Previous studies have revealed that ICL is sensitive to the selection and the ordering of demonstrations. However, there are few studies regarding the impact of the demonstration number on the ICL performance within a limited input length of LLM, because it is commonly believed that the number of demonstrations is positively correlated with model performance. In this paper, we found this conclusion does not always hold true. Through pilot experiments, we discover that increasing the number of demonstrations does not necessarily lead to improved performance. Building upon this insight, we propose a Dynamic Demonstrations Controller (D$^2$Controller), which can improve the ICL performance by adjusting the number of demonstrations dynamically. The experimental results show that D$^2$Controller yields a 4.6% relative improvement on ten different sizes of LLMs across ten datasets. Moreover, we also extend our method to previous ICL models and achieve competitive results.
title Dynamic Demonstrations Controller for In-Context Learning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00385