Latent Learningscape Guided In-context Learning

Anlai Zhou, Sunshine Jiang, Yifei Liu, Yiquan Wu, Kun Kuang, Jun Xiao


Abstract
The growing interest in leveraging large language models is driven by their exceptional imitation and reasoning capabilities. In-context learning (ICL), a streamlined method, has shown potential in boosting these models’ performance without modifying their underlying parameters, especially when supplied with suitable demonstrations. However, existing methods mainly choose demonstrations by comparing surface-level semantic similarities (e.g., based on embedding) and fall short of identifying the most fitting ones. This paper introduces the concept of a “latent learningscape”, a more nuanced representation that describes the characteristic of the demonstrations. Building on this concept, we develop a results-driven approach to characterize the latent learningscape features of demonstrations, which then inform the creation of more effective prompts. Through comprehensive testing across datasets in arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks, our approach outperforms leading models, showing an average increase in scores by 7.4 percentage points.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.482
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8090–8101
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.482
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anlai Zhou, Sunshine Jiang, Yifei Liu, Yiquan Wu, Kun Kuang, and Jun Xiao. 2024. Latent Learningscape Guided In-context Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 8090–8101, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Latent Learningscape Guided In-context Learning (Zhou et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.482.pdf