Not All Demonstration Examples are Equally Beneficial: Reweighting Demonstration Examples for In-Context Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yang, Zhe, Dai, Damai, Wang, Peiyi, Sui, Zhifang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Yang, Zhe
Dai, Damai
Wang, Peiyi
Sui, Zhifang
author_facet Yang, Zhe
Dai, Damai
Wang, Peiyi
Sui, Zhifang
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained the In-Context Learning (ICL) ability with the models scaling up, allowing them to quickly adapt to downstream tasks with only a few demonstration examples prepended in the input sequence. Nonetheless, the current practice of ICL treats all demonstration examples equally, which still warrants improvement, as the quality of examples is usually uneven. In this paper, we investigate how to determine approximately optimal weights for demonstration examples and how to apply them during ICL. To assess the quality of weights in the absence of additional validation data, we design a masked self-prediction (MSP) score that exhibits a strong correlation with the final ICL performance. To expedite the weight-searching process, we discretize the continuous weight space and adopt beam search. With approximately optimal weights obtained, we further propose two strategies to apply them to demonstrations at different model positions. Experimental results on 8 text classification tasks show that our approach outperforms conventional ICL by a large margin. Our code are publicly available at https:github.com/Zhe-Young/WICL.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_08309
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Not All Demonstration Examples are Equally Beneficial: Reweighting Demonstration Examples for In-Context Learning
Yang, Zhe
Dai, Damai
Wang, Peiyi
Sui, Zhifang
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained the In-Context Learning (ICL) ability with the models scaling up, allowing them to quickly adapt to downstream tasks with only a few demonstration examples prepended in the input sequence. Nonetheless, the current practice of ICL treats all demonstration examples equally, which still warrants improvement, as the quality of examples is usually uneven. In this paper, we investigate how to determine approximately optimal weights for demonstration examples and how to apply them during ICL. To assess the quality of weights in the absence of additional validation data, we design a masked self-prediction (MSP) score that exhibits a strong correlation with the final ICL performance. To expedite the weight-searching process, we discretize the continuous weight space and adopt beam search. With approximately optimal weights obtained, we further propose two strategies to apply them to demonstrations at different model positions. Experimental results on 8 text classification tasks show that our approach outperforms conventional ICL by a large margin. Our code are publicly available at https:github.com/Zhe-Young/WICL.
title Not All Demonstration Examples are Equally Beneficial: Reweighting Demonstration Examples for In-Context Learning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08309