Data-Efficient Biomedical In-Context Learning: A Diversity-Enhanced Submodular Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Jun, Zhan, Zaifu, Zhang, Qixin, Lin, Mingquan, Song, Meijia, Zhang, Rui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916891447001088
author Wang, Jun
Zhan, Zaifu
Zhang, Qixin
Lin, Mingquan
Song, Meijia
Zhang, Rui
author_facet Wang, Jun
Zhan, Zaifu
Zhang, Qixin
Lin, Mingquan
Song, Meijia
Zhang, Rui
contents Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has leveraged their in-context learning (ICL) abilities to enable quick adaptation to unseen biomedical NLP tasks. By incorporating only a few input-output examples into prompts, LLMs can rapidly perform these new tasks. While the impact of these demonstrations on LLM performance has been extensively studied, most existing approaches prioritize representativeness over diversity when selecting examples from large corpora. To address this gap, we propose Dual-Div, a diversity-enhanced data-efficient framework for demonstration selection in biomedical ICL. Dual-Div employs a two-stage retrieval and ranking process: First, it identifies a limited set of candidate examples from a corpus by optimizing both representativeness and diversity (with optional annotation for unlabeled data). Second, it ranks these candidates against test queries to select the most relevant and non-redundant demonstrations. Evaluated on three biomedical NLP tasks (named entity recognition (NER), relation extraction (RE), and text classification (TC)) using LLaMA 3.1 and Qwen 2.5 for inference, along with three retrievers (BGE-Large, BMRetriever, MedCPT), Dual-Div consistently outperforms baselines-achieving up to 5% higher macro-F1 scores-while demonstrating robustness to prompt permutations and class imbalance. Our findings establish that diversity in initial retrieval is more critical than ranking-stage optimization, and limiting demonstrations to 3-5 examples maximizes performance efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08140
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Data-Efficient Biomedical In-Context Learning: A Diversity-Enhanced Submodular Perspective
Wang, Jun
Zhan, Zaifu
Zhang, Qixin
Lin, Mingquan
Song, Meijia
Zhang, Rui
Computation and Language
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has leveraged their in-context learning (ICL) abilities to enable quick adaptation to unseen biomedical NLP tasks. By incorporating only a few input-output examples into prompts, LLMs can rapidly perform these new tasks. While the impact of these demonstrations on LLM performance has been extensively studied, most existing approaches prioritize representativeness over diversity when selecting examples from large corpora. To address this gap, we propose Dual-Div, a diversity-enhanced data-efficient framework for demonstration selection in biomedical ICL. Dual-Div employs a two-stage retrieval and ranking process: First, it identifies a limited set of candidate examples from a corpus by optimizing both representativeness and diversity (with optional annotation for unlabeled data). Second, it ranks these candidates against test queries to select the most relevant and non-redundant demonstrations. Evaluated on three biomedical NLP tasks (named entity recognition (NER), relation extraction (RE), and text classification (TC)) using LLaMA 3.1 and Qwen 2.5 for inference, along with three retrievers (BGE-Large, BMRetriever, MedCPT), Dual-Div consistently outperforms baselines-achieving up to 5% higher macro-F1 scores-while demonstrating robustness to prompt permutations and class imbalance. Our findings establish that diversity in initial retrieval is more critical than ranking-stage optimization, and limiting demonstrations to 3-5 examples maximizes performance efficiency.
title Data-Efficient Biomedical In-Context Learning: A Diversity-Enhanced Submodular Perspective
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08140