In-Context Example Ordering Guided by Label Distributions

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Xu, Zhichao, Cohen, Daniel, Wang, Bei, Srikumar, Vivek
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Xu, Zhichao
Cohen, Daniel
Wang, Bei
Srikumar, Vivek
author_facet Xu, Zhichao
Cohen, Daniel
Wang, Bei
Srikumar, Vivek
contents By allowing models to predict without task-specific training, in-context learning (ICL) with pretrained LLMs has enormous potential in NLP. However, a number of problems persist in ICL. In particular, its performance is sensitive to the choice and order of in-context examples. Given the same set of in-context examples with different orderings, model performance may vary between near random to near state-of-the-art. In this work, we formulate in-context example ordering as an optimization problem. We examine three problem settings that differ in the assumptions they make about what is known about the task. Inspired by the idea of learning from label proportions, we propose two principles for in-context example ordering guided by model's probability predictions. We apply our proposed principles to thirteen text classification datasets and nine different autoregressive LLMs with 700M to 13B parameters. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms the baselines by improving the classification accuracy, reducing model miscalibration, and also by selecting better in-context examples.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_11447
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle In-Context Example Ordering Guided by Label Distributions
Xu, Zhichao
Cohen, Daniel
Wang, Bei
Srikumar, Vivek
Computation and Language
By allowing models to predict without task-specific training, in-context learning (ICL) with pretrained LLMs has enormous potential in NLP. However, a number of problems persist in ICL. In particular, its performance is sensitive to the choice and order of in-context examples. Given the same set of in-context examples with different orderings, model performance may vary between near random to near state-of-the-art. In this work, we formulate in-context example ordering as an optimization problem. We examine three problem settings that differ in the assumptions they make about what is known about the task. Inspired by the idea of learning from label proportions, we propose two principles for in-context example ordering guided by model's probability predictions. We apply our proposed principles to thirteen text classification datasets and nine different autoregressive LLMs with 700M to 13B parameters. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms the baselines by improving the classification accuracy, reducing model miscalibration, and also by selecting better in-context examples.
title In-Context Example Ordering Guided by Label Distributions
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11447