With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It has been a significant trend to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress and challenges of ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques, including training strategies, prompt designing strategies, and related analysis. Additionally, we explore various ICL application scenarios, such as data engineering and knowledge updating. Finally, we address the challenges of ICL and suggest potential directions for further research. We hope that our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL.

Code retrieval aims to identify code from extensive codebases that semantically aligns with a given query code snippet. Collecting a broad and high-quality set of query and code pairs is crucial to the success of this task. However, existing data collection methods struggle to effectively balance scalability and annotation quality. In this paper, we first analyze the factors influencing the quality of function annotations generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). We find that the invocation of intra-repository functions and third-party APIs plays a significant role. Building on this insight, we propose a novel annotation method that enhances the annotation context by incorporating the content of functions called within the repository and information on third-party API functionalities. Additionally, we integrate LLMs with a novel sorting method to address the multi-level function call relationships within repositories. Furthermore, by applying our proposed method across a range of repositories, we have developed the Query4Code dataset. The quality of this synthesized dataset is validated through both model training and human evaluation, demonstrating high-quality annotations. Moreover, cost analysis confirms the scalability of our annotation method.

The current framework for sequence labeling encompasses a feature extractor and a sequence tagger. This study introduces a unified framework named SLGAN, which harnesses the capabilities of Generative Adversarial Networks to address the challenges associated with Sequence Labeling tasks. SLGAN not only mitigates the limitation of GANs in backpropagating loss to discrete data but also exhibits strong adaptability to various sequence labeling tasks. Unlike traditional GANs, the discriminator within SLGAN does not discriminate whether data originates from the discriminator or the generator; instead, it focuses on predicting the correctness of each tag within the tag sequence. We conducted evaluations on six different tasks spanning four languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Word Segmentation, Chinese and English Named Entity Recognition, and Chinese Part-of-Speech Tagging. Our experimental results illustrate that SLGAN represents a versatile and highly effective solution, consistently achieving state-of-the-art or competitive performance results, irrespective of the specific task or language under consideration.

The gap between the trepidation of program reliability and the expense of repairs underscore the indispensability for Automated Program Repair (APR). APR is instrumental in transforming vulnerable programs into more robust ones, bolstering program reliability while simultaneously diminishing the financial burden of manual repairs. Commercial-scale language models (LM) have taken APR to unprecedented levels. However, due to the limitations of model capabilities by parameters, a one-step substantial modification may not achieve the desired effect for models with parameters less than 100B. Moreover, humans interact with the LLM through explicit prompts, which hinders the LLM from receiving feedback from compiler and test cases to automatically optimize its repair policies. Explicit prompts from humans not only increase additional manpower costs, but also pose potential misunderstandings between human’s intent and LMs.Based on the above considerations, we are exploring how to ensure small-scale LM still outperform through process supervision and feedback. We start by constructing a dataset named CodeNet4Repair, replete with multiple repair records, which supervises the fine-tuning of a foundational mode. Building upon the encouraging outcomes of reinforcement learning, we develop a reward model that serves as a critic, providing feedback for the fine-tuned LM’s action, progressively optimizing its policy. During inference, we require the LM to generate solutions iteratively until the repair effect no longer improves or hits the maximum step limit. The experimental results show that this process-based feedback not only outperforms larger outcome-based generation methods, but also nearly matches the performance of closed-source commercial large-scale LMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention for their remarkable capacity, alongside concerns about safety arising from their potential to produce harmful content. Red teaming aims to find prompts that could elicit harmful responses from LLMs, and is essential to discover and mitigate safety risks before real-world deployment. However, manual red teaming is both time-consuming and expensive, rendering it unscalable. In this paper, we propose RTPE, a scalable evolution framework to evolve red teaming prompts across both breadth and depth dimensions, facilitating the automatic generation of numerous high-quality and diverse red teaming prompts. Specifically, in-breadth evolving employs a novel enhanced in-context learning method to create a multitude of quality prompts, whereas in-depth evolving applies customized transformation operations to enhance both content and form of prompts, thereby increasing diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RTPE surpasses existing representative automatic red teaming methods on both attack success rate and diversity. In addition, based on 4,800 red teaming prompts created by RTPE, we further provide a systematic analysis of 8 representative LLMs across 8 sensitive topics.

The safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained increasing attention in recent years, but there still lacks a comprehensive approach for detecting safety issues within LLMs’ responses in an aligned, customizable and explainable manner. In this paper, we propose ShieldLM, an LLM-based safety detector, which aligns with common safety standards, supports customizable detection rules, and provides explanations for its decisions. To train ShieldLM, we compile a large bilingual dataset comprising 14,387 query-response pairs, annotating the safety of responses based on various safety standards. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ShieldLM surpasses strong baselines across four test sets, showcasing remarkable customizability and explainability. Besides performing well on standard detection datasets, ShieldLM has also been shown to be effective as a safety evaluator for advanced LLMs. ShieldLM is released at https://github.com/thu-coai/ShieldLM to support accurate and explainable safety detection under various safety standards.

Extracting timeline information from clinical narratives is critical for cancer research and practice using electronic health records (EHRs). In this study, we apply MedTimeline, our end-to-end hybrid NLP system combining large language model, deep learning with knowledge engineering, to the ChemoTimeLine challenge subtasks. Our experiment results in 0.83, 0.90, 0.84, and 0.53, 0.63, 0.39, respectively, for subtask1 and subtask2 in breast, melanoma and ovarian cancer.

Multimodal sarcasm detection has received considerable attention due to its unique role in social networks. Existing methods often rely on feature concatenation to fuse different modalities or model the inconsistencies among modalities. However, sarcasm is often embodied in local and momentary nuances in a subtle way, which causes difficulty for sarcasm detection. To effectively incorporate these nuances, this paper presents Context-Aware Self-Attention Fusion (CAAF) to integrate local and momentary multimodal information into specific words. Furthermore, due to the instantaneous nature of sarcasm, the connotative meanings of words post-multimodal integration generally deviate from their denotative meanings. Therefore, Word Weight Calculation (WWC) is presented to compute the weight of specific words based on CAAF’s fusion nuances, illustrating the inconsistency between connotation and denotation. We evaluate our method on the MUStARD dataset, achieving an accuracy of 76.9 and an F1 score of 76.1, which surpasses the current state-of-the-art IWAN model by 1.7 and 1.6 respectively.

Recently, fine-tuning the large pre-trained language models on the labeled sentiment dataset achieves appealing performance. However, the obtained model may not generalize well to the other domains due to the domain shift, and it is expensive to update the entire parameters within the large models. Although some existing domain matching methods are proposed to alleviate the above issues, there are multiple relevant source domains in practice which makes the whole training more costly and complicated. To this end, we focus on the efficient unsupervised multi-source sentiment adaptation task which is more challenging and beneficial for real-world applications. Specifically, we propose to extract multi-layer features from the large pre-trained model, and design a dynamic parameters fusion module to exploit these features for both efficient and adaptive tuning. Furthermore, we propose a novel feature structure matching constraint, which enforces similar feature-wise correlations across different domains. Compared with the traditional domain matching methods which tend to pull all feature instances close, we show that the proposed feature structure matching is more robust and generalizable in the multi-source scenario. Extensive experiments on several multi-source sentiment analysis benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed framework.

Embedding models have shown great power in knowledge graph completion (KGC) task. By learning structural constraints for each training triple, these methods implicitly memorize intrinsic relation rules to infer missing links. However, this paper points out that the multi-hop relation rules are hard to be reliably memorized due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy, making embedding models underperform in predicting links between distant entity pairs. To alleviate this problem, we present Vertical Learning Paradigm (VLP), which extends embedding models by allowing to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction. Rather than solely relying on the implicit memory, VLP directly provides additional cues to improve the generalization ability of embedding models, especially making the distant link prediction significantly easier. Moreover, we also propose a novel relative distance based negative sampling technique (ReD) for more effective optimization. Experiments demonstrate the validity and generality of our proposals on two standard benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/rui9812/VLP.

One-hot labels are commonly employed as ground truth in Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC). However, this approach may not fully encompass all the emotions conveyed in a single utterance, leading to suboptimal performance. Regrettably, current ERC datasets lack comprehensive emotionally distributed labels. To address this issue, we propose the Emotion Label Refinement (EmoLR) method, which utilizes context- and speaker-sensitive information to infer mixed emotional labels. EmoLR comprises an Emotion Predictor (EP) module and a Label Refinement (LR) module. The EP module recognizes emotions and provides context/speaker states for the LR module. Subsequently, the LR module calculates the similarity between these states and ground-truth labels, generating a refined label distribution (RLD). The RLD captures a more comprehensive range of emotions than the original one-hot labels. These refined labels are then used for model training in place of the one-hot labels. Experimental results on three public conversational datasets demonstrate that our EmoLR achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Recently, fine-tuning the pre-trained language model (PrLM) on labeled sentiment datasets demonstrates impressive performance. However, collecting labeled sentiment dataset is time-consuming, and fine-tuning the whole PrLM brings about much computation cost. To this end, we focus on multi-source unsupervised sentiment adaptation problem with the pre-trained features, which is more practical and challenging. We first design a dynamic feature network to fully exploit the extracted pre-trained features for efficient domain adaptation. Meanwhile, with the difference of the traditional source-target domain alignment methods, we propose a novel asymmetric mutual learning strategy, which can robustly estimate the pseudo-labels of the target domain with the knowledge from all the other source models. Experiments on multiple sentiment benchmarks show that our method outperforms the recent state-of-the-art approaches, and we also conduct extensive ablation studies to verify the effectiveness of each the proposed module.

Event detection (ED) aims at identifying event instances of specified types in given texts, which has been formalized as a sequence labeling task. As far as we know, existing neural-based ED models make decisions relying entirely on the contextual semantic features of each word in the inputted text, which we find is easy to be confused by the varied contexts in the test stage. To this end, we come up with the idea of introducing a set of statistical features from word-event co-occurrence frequencies in the entire training set to cooperate with contextual features. Specifically, we propose a Semantic and Statistic-Joint Discriminative Network (SS-JDN) consisting of a semantic feature extractor, a statistical feature extractor, and a joint event discriminator. In experiments, SS-JDN effectively exceeds ten recent strong baselines on ACE2005 and KBP2015 datasets. Further, we perform extensive experiments to comprehensively probe SS-JDN.