On the Relation between Sensitivity and Accuracy in In-Context Learning

Yanda Chen, Chen Zhao, Zhou Yu, Kathleen McKeown, He He


Abstract
In-context learning (ICL) suffers from oversensitivity to the prompt, making it unreliable in real-world scenarios. We study the sensitivity of ICL with respect to multiple perturbation types. First, we find that label bias obscures the true sensitivity, and therefore prior work may have significantly underestimated ICL sensitivity. Second, we observe a strong negative correlation between ICL sensitivity and accuracy: predictions sensitive to perturbations are less likely to be correct. Motivated by these findings, we propose SenSel, a few-shot selective prediction method that abstains from sensitive predictions. Experiments on ten classification datasets show that SenSel consistently outperforms two commonly used confidence-based and entropy-based baselines on abstention decisions.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.12
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
155–167
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.12
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.12
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yanda Chen, Chen Zhao, Zhou Yu, Kathleen McKeown, and He He. 2023. On the Relation between Sensitivity and Accuracy in In-Context Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 155–167, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the Relation between Sensitivity and Accuracy in In-Context Learning (Chen et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.12.pdf