Through in-context learning (ICL), large-scale language models are effective few-shot learners without additional model fine-tuning. However, the ICL performance does not scale well with the number of available training samples as it is limited by the inherent input length constraint of the underlying language model. Meanwhile, many studies have revealed that language models are also powerful feature extractors, allowing them to be utilized in a black-box manner and enabling the linear probing paradigm, where lightweight discriminators are trained on top of the pre-extracted input representations. This paper proposes prompt-augmented linear probing (PALP), a hybrid of linear probing and ICL, which leverages the best of both worlds. PALP inherits the scalability of linear probing and the capability of enforcing language models to derive more meaningful representations via tailoring input into a more conceivable form. Throughout in-depth investigations on various datasets, we verified that PALP significantly enhances the input representations closing the gap between ICL in the data-hungry scenario and fine-tuning in the data-abundant scenario with little training overhead, potentially making PALP a strong alternative in a black-box scenario.

及时调整是将预训练模型调整到下游任务的极其有效的工具。但是，基于标准及时的方法主要考虑下游任务的足够数据的情况。目前尚不清楚是否可以将优势传输到几杆式制度，在每个下游任务中只有有限的数据。尽管有些作品证明了在几次弹奏设置下及时调整的潜力，但通过搜索离散提示或使用有限数据调整软提示的主流方法仍然非常具有挑战性。通过广泛的实证研究，我们发现迅速调整和完全微调之间的学习差距仍然存在差距。为了弥合差距，我们提出了一个新的及时调整框架，称为软模板调整（STT）。 STT结合了手册和自动提示，并将下游分类任务视为掩盖语言建模任务。对不同设置的全面评估表明，STT可以在不引入其他参数的情况下缩小微调和基于及时的方法之间的差距。值得注意的是，它甚至可以胜过情感分类任务的时间和资源消耗的微调方法。

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have exhibited remarkable few-shot learning capabilities when provided a few examples in a natural language prompt as demonstrations of test instances, i.e., in-context learning. However, the performance of in-context learning is susceptible to the choice of prompt format, training examples and the ordering of the training examples. In this paper, we propose a novel nearest-neighbor calibration framework for in-context learning to ease this issue. It is inspired by a phenomenon that the in-context learning paradigm produces incorrect labels when inferring training instances, which provides a useful supervised signal to calibrate predictions. Thus, our method directly augments the predictions with a $k$-nearest-neighbor ($k$NN) classifier over a datastore of cached few-shot instance representations obtained by PLMs and their corresponding labels. Then adaptive neighbor selection and feature regularization modules are introduced to make full use of a few support instances to reduce the $k$NN retrieval noise. Experiments on various few-shot text classification tasks demonstrate that our method significantly improves in-context learning, while even achieving comparable performance with state-of-the-art tuning-based approaches in some sentiment analysis tasks.

With the increasing ability of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has become a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions only based on contexts augmented with a few training examples. It has been a new trend exploring ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress, challenges, and future work in ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques of ICL, including training strategies, prompting strategies, and so on. Finally, we present the challenges of ICL and provide potential directions for further research. We hope our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL in future work.

The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF-better few-shot fine-tuning of language models 1 -a suite of simple and complementary techniques for finetuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning. 2 * The first two authors contributed equally. 1 Alternatively, language models' best friends forever. 2 Our implementation is publicly available at https:// github.com/princeton-nlp/LM-BFF.

非常大的预培训的语言模型（PTM）（如GPT-3）通常被释放为服务，允许用户设计特定于任务的提示以通过一些黑盒API查询PTMS。在这样的场景中，我们调用语言模型 - AS-Service（LMAAS），PTM的梯度通常不可用。我们可以通过仅访问模型推断API来优化任务提示吗？基于最近的观察结果，大型PTMS具有非常低的内在维度，这项工作提出了黑匣子调谐，通过无衍生算法优化PTM。特别是，我们通过迭代调用PTM推断API来调用CMA-es以优化预先提示的连续提示。我们的实验结果表明，黑匣子调整罗伯塔在少数标签样本上不仅显着优于手动提示和GPT-3的上下文学习，而且还超越了基于梯度的对应物，即提示调整和完整的模型调整。

GPT-3等大型语言模型是优秀的几次学习者，允许他们通过自然文本提示来控制。最近的研究报告称，基于及时的直接分类消除了对微调的需求，但缺乏数据和推理可扩展性。本文提出了一种新的数据增强技术，利用大规模语言模型来生成来自真实样本的混合的现实文本样本。我们还建议利用语言模型预测的软标签，从大规模语言模型中有效地蒸馏知识并同时创建文本扰动。我们对各种分类任务进行数据增强实验，并显示我们的方法非常优于现有的文本增强方法。消融研究和定性分析为我们的方法提供了更多的见解。

迅速的学习方法通​​过诱导更好的几次表现，在他们仍然遵循基于参数的学习范式的同时，引起了自然语言处理的波动。学习中的遗忘和死记硬背的记忆问题可能会遇到不稳定的概括问题。具体而言，香草及时的学习可能难以利用死记硬背的非典型实例，在完全监督的培训或过度贴身模式的情况下使用低射击数据。为了减轻此类局限性，我们以将知识从记忆中解耦的动机发展为有助于模型在概括和记忆之间取得平衡。与香草及时学习相反，重新启动构造了培训实例中的开放式知识店，并在输入，培训和推理过程中实现检索机制，从而使该模型能够从培训语料库中检索相关环境作为能力为提示增强。广泛的实验表明，Retroppt可以在几次射击和零拍设置中获得更好的性能。此外，我们进一步说明，我们提出的撤退可以通过新数据集获得更好的概括能力。对记忆的详细分析确实显示逆转可以减少语言模型对记忆的依赖；因此，改善下游任务的概括。

Recent studies have revealed the intriguing few-shot learning ability of pretrained language models (PLMs): They can quickly adapt to a new task when fine-tuned on a small amount of labeled data formulated as prompts, without requiring abundant task-specific annotations. Despite their promising performance, most existing few-shot approaches that only learn from the small training set still underperform fully supervised training by nontrivial margins. In this work, we study few-shot learning with PLMs from a different perspective: We first tune an autoregressive PLM on the few-shot samples and then use it as a generator to synthesize a large amount of novel training samples which augment the original training set. To encourage the generator to produce label-discriminative samples, we train it via weighted maximum likelihood where the weight of each token is automatically adjusted based on a discriminative meta-learning objective. A classification PLM can then be fine-tuned on both the few-shot and the synthetic samples with regularization for better generalization and stability. Our approach FewGen achieves an overall better result across seven classification tasks of the GLUE benchmark than existing few-shot learning methods, improving no-augmentation methods by 5+ average points, and outperforming augmentation methods by 3+ average points.

With the evergrowing sizes of pre-trained models (PTMs), it has been an emerging practice to only provide the inference APIs for users, namely model-as-a-service (MaaS) setting. To adapt PTMs with model parameters frozen, most current approaches focus on the input side, seeking for powerful prompts to stimulate models for correct answers. However, we argue that input-side adaptation could be arduous due to the lack of gradient signals and they usually require thousands of API queries, resulting in high computation and time costs. In light of this, we present Decoder Tuning (DecT), which in contrast optimizes task-specific decoder networks on the output side. Specifically, DecT first extracts prompt-stimulated output scores for initial predictions. On top of that, we train an additional decoder network on the output representations to incorporate posterior data knowledge. By gradient-based optimization, DecT can be trained within several seconds and requires only one PTM query per sample. Empirically, we conduct extensive natural language understanding experiments and show that DecT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with a $10^3\times$ speed-up.

大型预训练的语言模型（PLM）的最新进展导致了自然语言理解（NLU）任务的令人印象深刻的增长，并具有特定于任务的微调。但是，直接调整PLM在很大程度上依赖大量的标记实例，这些实例通常很难获得。迅速对PLM的调整已被证明对各种少数次任务很有价值。现有的作品研究基于迅速的NLU任务的基于及时的调整，主要集中于用语言器来得出正确的标签单词或生成及时的模板，以从PLM中启发语义。此外，还对常规数据增强方法进行了验证，可用于少量射击任务。但是，目前几乎没有针对基于及时的调整范式设计的数据增强方法。因此，我们研究了迅速的少数射击学习者的新数据增强问题。由于标签语义对于迅速的调整至关重要，因此我们提出了一种新颖的标签引导数据增强方法促进DA，该方法利用了丰富的标签语义信息以进行数据增强。很少的文本分类任务的广泛实验结果表明，我们提出的框架通过有效利用标签语义和数据扩展来实现自然语言理解来实现卓越的性能。

We describe PromptBoosting, a query-efficient procedure for building a text classifier from a neural language model (LM) without access to the LM's parameters, gradients, or hidden representations. This form of "black-box" classifier training has become increasingly important as the cost of training and inference in large-scale LMs grows. But existing black-box LM classifier learning approaches are themselves computationally inefficient, typically specializing LMs to the target task by searching in a large space of (discrete or continuous) prompts using zeroth-order optimization methods. Instead of directly optimizing in prompt space, PromptBoosting obtains a small pool of prompts via a gradient-free approach and then constructs a large pool of weak learners by pairing these prompts with different elements of the LM's output distribution. These weak learners are then ensembled using the AdaBoost algorithm. The entire learning process requires only a small number of forward passes and no backward pass. Experiments show that PromptBoosting achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple black-box few-shot classification tasks, and matches or outperforms full fine-tuning in both few-shot and standard learning paradigms, while training 10x faster than existing black-box methods.

How can we extend a pre-trained model to many language understanding tasks, without labeled or additional unlabeled data? Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been effective for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, existing approaches either require fine-tuning on downstream labeled datasets or manually constructing proper prompts. In this paper, we propose nonparametric prompting PLM (NPPrompt) for fully zero-shot language understanding. Unlike previous methods, NPPrompt uses only pre-trained language models and does not require any labeled data or additional raw corpus for further fine-tuning, nor does it rely on humans to construct a comprehensive set of prompt label words. We evaluate NPPrompt against previous major few-shot and zero-shot learning methods on diverse NLP tasks: including text classification, text entailment, similar text retrieval, and paraphrasing. Experimental results demonstrate that our NPPrompt outperforms the previous best fully zero-shot method by big margins, with absolute gains of 12.8% in accuracy on text classification and 18.9% on the GLUE benchmark.

我们提出了Patron，这是一种新方法，它使用基于及时的不确定性估计，用于在冷启动场景下进行预训练的语言模型进行微调的数据选择，即，没有初始标记的数据可用。在顾客中，我们设计（1）一种基于迅速的不确定性传播方法来估计数据点的重要性和（2）分区 - 然后 - 剥离（PTR）策略，以促进对注释的样品多样性。六个文本分类数据集的实验表明，赞助人的表现优于最强的冷启动数据选择基准，高达6.9％。此外，仅具有128个标签，顾客分别基于香草微调和及时的学习，获得了91.0％和92.1％的全面监督性能。我们的赞助人实施可在\ url {https://github.com/yueyu1030/patron}上获得。

大规模的预训练的语言模型（PLM）以能够仅通过在提示中调节一些被称为示范的示威演示的情况而不明确调整为所需的下游任务而被称为示威的示威来解决任务。但是，这种过程（即，在文章中的学习）自然会高度依赖通常从外部数据集中选择的演示。在本文中，我们提出了自我生成的文化学习（SG-ICL），该学习生成了从PLM本身中的文化学习演示，以最大程度地减少对外部演示的依赖。我们对四个不同的文本分类任务进行实验，并显示SG-ICL的表现明显优于零射击学习，并且通常价值约0.6个黄金训练样本。此外，与培训数据集的随机选择相比，我们的生成的演示表现出更一致的性能，方差较低。

无需进行任何架构更改的微调审计语言模型（LMS）已成为学习下游任务各种语言的规范。但是，对于非语言下游任务，一种常见的做法是使用特定于任务的设计来进行输入，输出层和损失功能。例如，可以通过用图像补丁嵌入层替换单词嵌入层，带有10向输出层的单词图表输出层以及单词预测丢失，将LM微调为MNIST分类器。 - 分别分类损失。出现一个自然的问题：LM微调可以在不更改模型架构或损失功能的情况下解决非语言的下游任务吗？为了回答这一点，我们提出了语言交织的微调（LIFT），并通过对非语言分类和回归任务的套件进行广泛的经验研究来研究其功效和局限性。 Lift不会对模型体系结构或损失功能进行任何更改，它仅依赖于自然语言界面，从而使“使用LMS进行无代码机”学习。我们发现，在各种低维分类和回归任务中，LIFT的性能相对较好，在许多情况下匹配了最佳基线的性能，尤其是对于分类任务。我们报告了有关升力的基本特性的实验结果，包括其电感偏差，样品效率，推断出外推能力，对异常值的鲁棒性和标签噪声以及概括。我们还分析了一些特定于提升的属性/技术，例如，通过适当提示，预测不确定性量化和两阶段微调，上下文感知学习。我们的代码可从https://github.com/uw-madison-lee-lab/languageinterfacefacefacefinetuning获得。

几乎没有射击的内在学习（ICL）使预训练的语言模型能够通过为输入的一部分提供少量的培训示例来执行以前的任务，而无需任何基于梯度的培训。 ICL会产生大量的计算，内存和存储成本，因为它每次进行预测时都涉及处理所有培训示例。参数有效的微调（PEFT）（例如，适配器模块，提示调谐，稀疏更新方法等）提供了替代范式，其中训练了一组少量参数以启用模型来执行新任务。在本文中，我们严格地比较了几个ICL和PEFT，并证明后者提供了更好的准确性，并大大降低了计算成本。在此过程中，我们引入了一种称为（IA）$^3 $的新PEFT方法，该方法通过学习的向量来扩展激活，从而获得更强的性能，同时仅引入相对少量的新参数。我们还提出了一个基于称为T-FEW的T0模型的简单食谱，可以将其应用于新任务，而无需特定于任务的调整或修改。我们通过将T-FEW应用于木筏基准，首次实现超人性能，并以6％的绝对性能优于最先进的方法来验证T-FEW对完全看不见的任务的有效性。我们实验中使用的所有代码均可公开使用。

Controllable Text Generation (CTG) is emerging area in the field of natural language generation (NLG). It is regarded as crucial for the development of advanced text generation technologies that are more natural and better meet the specific constraints in practical applications. In recent years, methods using large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs), in particular the widely used transformer-based PLMs, have become a new paradigm of NLG, allowing generation of more diverse and fluent text. However, due to the lower level of interpretability of deep neural networks, the controllability of these methods need to be guaranteed. To this end, controllable text generation using transformer-based PLMs has become a rapidly growing yet challenging new research hotspot. A diverse range of approaches have emerged in the recent 3-4 years, targeting different CTG tasks which may require different types of controlled constraints. In this paper, we present a systematic critical review on the common tasks, main approaches and evaluation methods in this area. Finally, we discuss the challenges that the field is facing, and put forward various promising future directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey paper to summarize CTG techniques from the perspective of PLMs. We hope it can help researchers in related fields to quickly track the academic frontier, providing them with a landscape of the area and a roadmap for future research.

We introduce TeSS (Text Similarity Comparison using Sentence Encoder), a framework for zero-shot classification where the assigned label is determined by the embedding similarity between the input text and each candidate label prompt. We leverage representations from sentence encoders optimized to locate semantically similar samples closer to each other in embedding space during pre-training. The label prompt embeddings serve as prototypes of their corresponding class clusters. Furthermore, to compensate for the potentially poorly descriptive labels in their original format, we retrieve semantically similar sentences from external corpora and additionally use them with the original label prompt (TeSS-R). TeSS outperforms strong baselines on various closed-set and open-set classification datasets under zero-shot setting, with further gains when combined with label prompt diversification through retrieval. These results are robustly attained to verbalizer variations, an ancillary benefit of using a bi-encoder. Altogether, our method serves as a reliable baseline for zero-shot classification and a simple interface to assess the quality of sentence encoders.

快速学习已成为现代自然语言处理的新范式，它直接适应培训的语言模型（PLMS）到$ CLOZE $ -Style预测，自回归建模或序列到序列生成，从而导致各种任务的表现。但是，尚未提出及时学习的标准实施框架，以及大多数现有的及时学习码条，通常是不受管制的，仅为特定方案提供有限的实现。由于有许多细节，例如模板策略，初始化策略和语言化策略等，因此需要在快速学习中考虑，从业者面临障碍，以便快速调整所需的迅速学习方法到他们的应用程序。在本文中，我们展示了{OpenPrompt}，一个统一的易于使用的工具包，可以通过PLMS快速学习。 OpenPrompt是一项研究型框架，配备了效率，模块化和可扩展性，其组合性允许自由地将不同的PLMS，任务格式和提示模块组合在统一的范例中。用户可以宽松地部署快速学习框架，并在没有约束的情况下在不同的NLP任务上评估它们的泛化。 OpenPrompt在{\ url {https://github.com/thunlp/openprompt}}上公开发布。