Yueqi Zhang
2024
Focused Large Language Models are Stable Many-Shot Learners
Peiwen Yuan
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Shaoxiong Feng
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Yiwei Li
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Xinglin Wang
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Yueqi Zhang
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Chuyi Tan
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Boyuan Pan
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Heda Wang
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Yao Hu
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Kan Li
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of ICL does not necessarily scale well in many-shot (demonstration) settings. We hypothesize that the reason lies in more demonstrations dispersing the model attention from the query, hindering its understanding of key content, which we validate both theoretically and experimentally. Inspired by how humans learn from examples, we propose a training-free method FocusICL, which conducts triviality filtering to avoid attention being diverted by unimportant contents at token-level and operates hierarchical attention to further ensure sufficient attention towards current query at demonstration-level. We also design an efficient hyperparameter searching strategy for FocusICL based on model perplexity of demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments validate that FocusICL achieves an average performance improvement of 5.2% over vanilla ICL and scales well with many-shot demonstrations.
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Co-authors
- Peiwen Yuan 1
- Shaoxiong Feng 1
- Yiwei Li 1
- Xinglin Wang 1
- Chuyi Tan 1
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