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Hauptverfasser: Tao, Junyi, Chen, Xiaoyin, Liu, Nelson F.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09349
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author Tao, Junyi
Chen, Xiaoyin
Liu, Nelson F.
author_facet Tao, Junyi
Chen, Xiaoyin
Liu, Nelson F.
contents Large language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning from a few demonstrations (example-label pairs) to solve new tasks during inference. Despite the intuitive importance of high-quality demonstrations, previous work has observed that, in some settings, ICL performance is minimally affected by irrelevant labels (Min et al., 2022). We hypothesize that LMs perform ICL with irrelevant labels via two sequential processes: an inference function that solves the task, followed by a verbalization function that maps the inferred answer to the label space. Importantly, we hypothesize that the inference function is invariant to remappings of the label space (e.g., "true"/"false" to "cat"/"dog"), enabling LMs to share the same inference function across settings with different label words. We empirically validate this hypothesis with controlled layer-wise interchange intervention experiments. Our findings confirm the hypotheses on multiple datasets and tasks (natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and topic classification) and further suggest that the two functions can be localized in specific layers across various open-sourced models, including GEMMA-7B, MISTRAL-7B-V0.3, GEMMA-2-27B, and LLAMA-3.1-70B.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_09349
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inference and Verbalization Functions During In-Context Learning
Tao, Junyi
Chen, Xiaoyin
Liu, Nelson F.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning from a few demonstrations (example-label pairs) to solve new tasks during inference. Despite the intuitive importance of high-quality demonstrations, previous work has observed that, in some settings, ICL performance is minimally affected by irrelevant labels (Min et al., 2022). We hypothesize that LMs perform ICL with irrelevant labels via two sequential processes: an inference function that solves the task, followed by a verbalization function that maps the inferred answer to the label space. Importantly, we hypothesize that the inference function is invariant to remappings of the label space (e.g., "true"/"false" to "cat"/"dog"), enabling LMs to share the same inference function across settings with different label words. We empirically validate this hypothesis with controlled layer-wise interchange intervention experiments. Our findings confirm the hypotheses on multiple datasets and tasks (natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and topic classification) and further suggest that the two functions can be localized in specific layers across various open-sourced models, including GEMMA-7B, MISTRAL-7B-V0.3, GEMMA-2-27B, and LLAMA-3.1-70B.
title Inference and Verbalization Functions During In-Context Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09349