Comparable Demonstrations are Important in In-Context Learning: A Novel Perspective on Demonstration Selection

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Fan, Caoyun, Tian, Jidong, Li, Yitian, He, Hao, Jin, Yaohui
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Fan, Caoyun
Tian, Jidong
Li, Yitian
He, Hao
Jin, Yaohui
author_facet Fan, Caoyun
Tian, Jidong
Li, Yitian
He, Hao
Jin, Yaohui
contents In-Context Learning (ICL) is an important paradigm for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks through a few demonstrations. Despite the great success of ICL, the limitation of the demonstration number may lead to demonstration bias, i.e. the input-label mapping induced by LLMs misunderstands the task's essence. Inspired by human experience, we attempt to mitigate such bias through the perspective of the inter-demonstration relationship. Specifically, we construct Comparable Demonstrations (CDs) by minimally editing the texts to flip the corresponding labels, in order to highlight the task's essence and eliminate potential spurious correlations through the inter-demonstration comparison. Through a series of experiments on CDs, we find that (1) demonstration bias does exist in LLMs, and CDs can significantly reduce such bias; (2) CDs exhibit good performance in ICL, especially in out-of-distribution scenarios. In summary, this study explores the ICL mechanisms from a novel perspective, providing a deeper insight into the demonstration selection strategy for ICL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_07476
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Comparable Demonstrations are Important in In-Context Learning: A Novel Perspective on Demonstration Selection
Fan, Caoyun
Tian, Jidong
Li, Yitian
He, Hao
Jin, Yaohui
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
In-Context Learning (ICL) is an important paradigm for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks through a few demonstrations. Despite the great success of ICL, the limitation of the demonstration number may lead to demonstration bias, i.e. the input-label mapping induced by LLMs misunderstands the task's essence. Inspired by human experience, we attempt to mitigate such bias through the perspective of the inter-demonstration relationship. Specifically, we construct Comparable Demonstrations (CDs) by minimally editing the texts to flip the corresponding labels, in order to highlight the task's essence and eliminate potential spurious correlations through the inter-demonstration comparison. Through a series of experiments on CDs, we find that (1) demonstration bias does exist in LLMs, and CDs can significantly reduce such bias; (2) CDs exhibit good performance in ICL, especially in out-of-distribution scenarios. In summary, this study explores the ICL mechanisms from a novel perspective, providing a deeper insight into the demonstration selection strategy for ICL.
title Comparable Demonstrations are Important in In-Context Learning: A Novel Perspective on Demonstration Selection
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07476