Despite the surprising few-shot performance of in-context learning (ICL), it is still a common practice to randomly sample examples to serve as context. This paper advocates a new principle for ICL: self-adaptive in-context learning. The self-adaption mechanism is introduced to help each sample find an in-context example permutation (i.e., selection and ordering) that can derive the correct prediction, thus maximizing performance. To validate the effectiveness of self-adaptive ICL, we propose a general select-then-rank framework and instantiate it with new selection and ranking algorithms. Upon extensive evaluation on eight different NLP datasets, our self-adaptive ICL method achieves a 40% relative improvement over the common practice setting. Further analysis reveals the enormous potential of self-adaptive ICL that it might be able to close the gap between ICL and finetuning given more advanced algorithms. Our code is released to facilitate future research in this area: https://github.com/Shark-NLP/self-adaptive-ICL

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.

With a handful of demonstration examples, large-scale language models show strong capability to perform various tasks by in-context learning from these examples, without any fine-tuning. We demonstrate that in-context learning performance can be highly unstable across samples of examples, indicating the idiosyncrasies of how language models acquire information. We formulate example selection for in-context learning as a sequential decision problem, and propose a reinforcement learning algorithm for identifying generalizable policies to select demonstration examples. For GPT-2, our learned policies demonstrate strong abilities of generalizing to unseen tasks in training, with a $5.8\%$ improvement on average. Examples selected from our learned policies can even achieve a small improvement on GPT-3 Ada. However, the improvement diminishes on larger GPT-3 models, suggesting emerging capabilities of large language models.

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.

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.

最近的研究表明，理性或逐步思想链可用于改善多步推理任务的性能。我们重新考虑了理由的提示，提示了几次射击中的内部学习学习，其中（输入 - >输出）提示将扩展到（输入，理由 - >输出）提示。对于以理由为提示的提示，我们证明了现有的方法（依赖手动及时工程）如何受到可能损害绩效的次级理由。为了减轻这种脆弱性，我们提出了一个统一的授权合奏的统一框架，在该框架中，我们将输出空间中的理由抽样确定为可鲁棒提高性能的关键组成部分。该框架是一般的，可以轻松地扩展到常见的自然语言处理任务，即使传统上不利于中间步骤的任务，例如问题回答，单词感官歧义和情感分析。我们证明，与现有的提示方法相比，以理由为原理的合奏获得了更准确和可解释的结果 - 包括标准提示，没有理由和基于理由的链链链，同时通过相关理性同时提高了模型预测的解释性。

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。

Explaining the black-box predictions of NLP models naturally and accurately is an important open problem in natural language generation. These free-text explanations are expected to contain sufficient and carefully-selected evidence to form supportive arguments for predictions. Due to the superior generative capacity of large pretrained language models, recent work built on prompt engineering enables explanation generation without specific training. However, explanation generated through single-pass prompting often lacks sufficiency and conciseness. To address this problem, we develop an information bottleneck method EIB to produce refined explanations that are sufficient and concise. Our approach regenerates the free-text explanation by polishing the single-pass output from the pretrained language model but retaining the information that supports the contents being explained. Experiments on two out-of-domain tasks verify the effectiveness of EIB through automatic evaluation and thoroughly-conducted human evaluation.

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.

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.

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.

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。

Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) requires models to answer factoid questions with no context given. The common way for this task is to train models on a large-scale annotated dataset to retrieve related documents and generate answers based on these documents. In this paper, we show that the ODQA architecture can be dramatically simplified by treating Large Language Models (LLMs) as a knowledge corpus and propose a Self-Prompting framework for LLMs to perform ODQA so as to eliminate the need for training data and external knowledge corpus. Concretely, we firstly generate multiple pseudo QA pairs with background passages and one-sentence explanations for these QAs by prompting LLMs step by step and then leverage the generated QA pairs for in-context learning. Experimental results show our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods by +8.8 EM averagely on three widely-used ODQA datasets, and even achieves comparable performance with several retrieval-augmented fine-tuned models.

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。

Large-scale generative models show an impressive ability to perform a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using in-context learning, where a few examples are used to describe a task to the model. For Machine Translation (MT), these examples are typically randomly sampled from the development dataset with a similar distribution as the evaluation set. However, it is unclear how the choice of these in-context examples and their ordering impacts the output translation quality. In this work, we aim to understand the properties of good in-context examples for MT in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. We show that the translation quality and the domain of the in-context examples matter and that 1-shot noisy unrelated example can have a catastrophic impact on output quality. While concatenating multiple random examples reduces the effect of noise, a single good prompt optimized to maximize translation quality on the development dataset can elicit learned information from the pre-trained language model. Adding similar examples based on an n-gram overlap with the test source significantly and consistently improves the translation quality of the outputs, outperforming a strong kNN-MT baseline in 2 out of 4 out-of-domain datasets.

数学推理是人类智力的核心能力，在抽象思维和逻辑推理中对机器提出了独特的挑战。最近的大型预训练的语言模型（例如GPT-3）在以文本形式（例如数学单词问题（MWP））编写的数学推理任务上取得了显着的进步。但是，未知模型是否可以处理更复杂的问题，这些问题涉及数学推理，例如表格数据。为了填补空白，我们提出了表格数学单词问题（TABMWP），这是一个包含38,431个开放域级等级问题的新数据集，这些问题需要在文本和表格数据上进行数学推理。 TABMWP中的每个问题都与表格上下文对齐，该上下文作为图像，半结构化文本和结构化表。有两种类型的问题：自由文本和多选择，每个问题都用金解决方案注释以揭示多步推理过程。我们在TABMWP上评估了不同的预训练模型，包括在几次设置中的GPT-3模型。正如先前的研究所表明的那样，由于很少有GPT-3依赖于内在的示例的选择，因此其性能是不稳定的，并且可能会降解为几乎机会。处理TABMWP等复杂问题时，不稳定的问题更为严重。为了减轻这种情况，我们进一步提出了一种新颖的方法，即PresspG，该方法利用策略梯度学习从少量培训数据中选择中文示例，然后为测试示例构造相应的提示。实验结果表明，与随机选择相比，我们的方法在准确性度量上优于最佳基线，并显着降低了预测方差，这验证了其在选择性上下文示例中的有效性。

The strong few-shot in-context learning capability of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as GPT-3 is highly appealing for application domains such as biomedicine, which feature high and diverse demands of language technologies but also high data annotation costs. In this paper, we present the first systematic and comprehensive study to compare the few-shot performance of GPT-3 in-context learning with fine-tuning smaller (i.e., BERT-sized) PLMs on two highly representative biomedical information extraction tasks, named entity recognition and relation extraction. We follow the true few-shot setting to avoid overestimating models' few-shot performance by model selection over a large validation set. We also optimize GPT-3's performance with known techniques such as contextual calibration and dynamic in-context example retrieval. However, our results show that GPT-3 still significantly underperforms compared to simply fine-tuning a smaller PLM. In addition, GPT-3 in-context learning also yields smaller gains in accuracy when more training data becomes available. Our in-depth analyses further reveal issues of the in-context learning setting that may be detrimental to information extraction tasks in general. Given the high cost of experimenting with GPT-3, we hope our study provides guidance for biomedical researchers and practitioners towards more promising directions such as fine-tuning small PLMs.

Natural language prompts have been shown to facilitate cross-task generalization for large language models. However, with no or limited labeled examples, the cross-task performance is highly sensitive to the choice of prompts, while selecting a high-performing prompt is challenging given the scarcity of labels. To address the issue, we propose a Zero-Label Prompt Selection (ZPS) method that selects prompts without any labeled data or gradient update. Specifically, given the candidate human-written prompts for a task, ZPS labels a set of unlabeled data with a prompt ensemble and uses the pseudo-labels for prompt selection. Experiments show that ZPS improves over prior methods by a sizeable margin in zero-label performance. We also extend ZPS to a few-shot setting and show its advantages over strong baselines such as prompt tuning and model tuning.

Large language models have exhibited intriguing in-context learning capability, achieving promising zero- and few-shot performance without updating the parameters. However, conventional in-context learning is usually restricted by length constraints, rendering it ineffective to absorb supervision from a large number of examples. In order to go beyond few shots, we introduce structured prompting that breaks the length limit and scales in-context learning to thousands of examples. Specifically, demonstration examples are separately encoded with well-designed position embeddings, and then they are jointly attended by the test example using a rescaled attention mechanism. So we can scale the number of exemplars with linear complexity instead of quadratic complexity with respect to length. Experimental results on a diverse set of tasks show that our approach improves end-task performance and reduces evaluation variance over conventional in-context learning as the number of demonstration examples increases. Code has been released at https://aka.ms/structured-prompting.

One of the most impressive results of recent NLP history is the ability of pre-trained language models to solve new tasks in a zero-shot setting. To achieve this, NLP tasks are framed as natural language prompts, generating a response indicating the predicted output. Nonetheless, the performance in such settings often lags far behind its supervised counterpart, suggesting a large space for potential improvement. In this paper, we explore methods to utilize unlabeled data to improve zero-shot performance. Specifically, we take advantage of the fact that multiple prompts can be used to specify a single task, and propose to regularize prompt consistency, encouraging consistent predictions over this diverse set of prompts. Our method makes it possible to fine-tune the model either with extra unlabeled training data, or directly on test input at inference time in an unsupervised manner. In experiments, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot learner, T0 (Sanh et al., 2022), on 9 out of 11 datasets across 4 NLP tasks by up to 10.6 absolute points in terms of accuracy. The gains are often attained with a small number of unlabeled examples.