In-Context Learning with Iterative Demonstration Selection

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Qin, Chengwei, Zhang, Aston, Chen, Chen, Dagar, Anirudh, Ye, Wenming
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915082289545216
author Qin, Chengwei
Zhang, Aston
Chen, Chen
Dagar, Anirudh
Ye, Wenming
author_facet Qin, Chengwei
Zhang, Aston
Chen, Chen
Dagar, Anirudh
Ye, Wenming
contents Spurred by advancements in scale, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong few-shot learning ability via in-context learning (ICL). However, the performance of ICL has been shown to be highly sensitive to the selection of few-shot demonstrations. Selecting the most suitable examples as context remains an ongoing challenge and an open problem. Existing literature has highlighted the importance of selecting examples that are diverse or semantically similar to the test sample while ignoring the fact that the optimal selection dimension, i.e., diversity or similarity, is task-specific. Based on how the test sample is answered, we propose Iterative Demonstration Selection (IDS) to leverage the merits of both dimensions. Using zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning (Zero-shot-CoT), IDS iteratively selects examples that are diverse but still strongly correlated with the test sample as ICL demonstrations. Specifically, IDS applies Zero-shot-CoT to the test sample before demonstration selection. The output reasoning path is then used to choose demonstrations that are prepended to the test sample for inference. The generated answer is followed by its corresponding reasoning path for extracting a new set of demonstrations in the next iteration. After several iterations, IDS adopts majority voting to obtain the final result. Through extensive experiments on tasks including reasoning, question answering, and topic classification, we demonstrate that IDS can consistently outperform existing ICL demonstration selection methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_09881
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle In-Context Learning with Iterative Demonstration Selection
Qin, Chengwei
Zhang, Aston
Chen, Chen
Dagar, Anirudh
Ye, Wenming
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Spurred by advancements in scale, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong few-shot learning ability via in-context learning (ICL). However, the performance of ICL has been shown to be highly sensitive to the selection of few-shot demonstrations. Selecting the most suitable examples as context remains an ongoing challenge and an open problem. Existing literature has highlighted the importance of selecting examples that are diverse or semantically similar to the test sample while ignoring the fact that the optimal selection dimension, i.e., diversity or similarity, is task-specific. Based on how the test sample is answered, we propose Iterative Demonstration Selection (IDS) to leverage the merits of both dimensions. Using zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning (Zero-shot-CoT), IDS iteratively selects examples that are diverse but still strongly correlated with the test sample as ICL demonstrations. Specifically, IDS applies Zero-shot-CoT to the test sample before demonstration selection. The output reasoning path is then used to choose demonstrations that are prepended to the test sample for inference. The generated answer is followed by its corresponding reasoning path for extracting a new set of demonstrations in the next iteration. After several iterations, IDS adopts majority voting to obtain the final result. Through extensive experiments on tasks including reasoning, question answering, and topic classification, we demonstrate that IDS can consistently outperform existing ICL demonstration selection methods.
title In-Context Learning with Iterative Demonstration Selection
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09881