Although large language models can be prompted for both zero- and few-shot learning, performance drops significantly when no demonstrations are available. In this paper, we introduce Z-ICL, a new zero-shot method that closes the gap by constructing pseudo-demonstrations for a given test input using a raw text corpus. Concretely, pseudo-demonstrations are constructed by (1) finding the nearest neighbors to the test input from the corpus and pairing them with random task labels, and (2) applying a set of techniques to reduce the amount of direct copying the model does from the resulting demonstrations. Evaluation on nine classification datasets shows that Z-ICL outperforms previous zero-shot methods by a significant margin, and is on par with in-context learning with labeled training data in the few-shot setting. Overall, Z-ICL provides a significantly higher estimate of the zero-shot performance levels of a model, and supports future efforts to develop better pseudo-demonstrations that further improve zero-shot results.

Existing language models (LMs) predict tokens with a softmax over a finite vocabulary, which can make it difficult to predict rare tokens or phrases. We introduce NPM, the first nonparametric masked language model that replaces this softmax with a nonparametric distribution over every phrase in a reference corpus. We show that NPM can be efficiently trained with a contrastive objective and an in-batch approximation to full corpus retrieval. Zero-shot evaluation on 9 closed-set tasks and 7 open-set tasks demonstrates that NPM outperforms significantly larger parametric models, either with or without a retrieve-and-generate approach. It is particularly better on dealing with rare patterns (word senses or facts), and predicting rare or nearly unseen words (e.g., non-Latin script). We release the model and code at github.com/facebookresearch/NPM.

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。

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.

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.

上下文学习是最近的自然语言理解的范例，其中大型预先接受的语言模型（LM）观察测试实例和一些训练示例作为其输入，并直接对输出进行解码，而不会对其参数进行任何更新。但是，表现已被证明强烈依赖于所选培训示例（称为提示）。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种有效的方法，用于使用注释的数据和LM检索内心学习的提示。给定输入输出对，我们估计给出输入和候选训练示例的输出的概率作为提示，以及基于这种概率的正面或负标记训练示例。然后，我们从该数据中培训一个有效的密集鼠尾，用于检索训练示例作为测试时间的提示。我们在三个序列到序列任务中评估我们的方法，其中语言话语映射到意义表示，并发现它基本上优于前面的工作和电路板的多个基线。

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.

Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the stored knowledge in these models may inevitably be incomplete, out-of-date, or incorrect. This motivates the need to utilize external knowledge to assist LLMs. Unfortunately, current methods for incorporating external knowledge often require additional training or fine-tuning, which can be costly and may not be feasible for LLMs. To address this issue, we propose a novel post-processing approach, rethinking with retrieval (RR), which retrieves relevant external knowledge based on the decomposed reasoning steps obtained from the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. This lightweight approach does not require additional training or fine-tuning and is not limited by the input length of LLMs. We evaluate the effectiveness of RR through extensive experiments with GPT-3 on three complex reasoning tasks: commonsense reasoning, temporal reasoning, and tabular reasoning. Our results show that RR can produce more faithful explanations and improve the performance of LLMs.

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.

Meta-training, which fine-tunes the language model (LM) on various downstream tasks by maximizing the likelihood of the target label given the task instruction and input instance, has improved the zero-shot task generalization performance. However, meta-trained LMs still struggle to generalize to challenging tasks containing novel labels unseen during meta-training. In this paper, we propose Flipped Learning, an alternative method of meta-training which trains the LM to generate the task instruction given the input instance and label. During inference, the LM trained with Flipped Learning, referred to as Flipped, selects the label option that is most likely to generate the task instruction. On 14 tasks of the BIG-bench benchmark, the 11B-sized Flipped outperforms zero-shot T0-11B and even a 16 times larger 3-shot GPT-3 (175B) on average by 8.4% and 9.7% points, respectively. Flipped gives particularly large improvements on tasks with unseen labels, outperforming T0-11B by up to +20% average F1 score. This indicates that the strong task generalization of Flipped comes from improved generalization to novel labels. We release our code at https://github.com/seonghyeonye/Flipped-Learning.

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。

Language models pretrained on text from a wide variety of sources form the foundation of today's NLP. In light of the success of these broad-coverage models, we investigate whether it is still helpful to tailor a pretrained model to the domain of a target task. We present a study across four domains (biomedical and computer science publications, news, and reviews) and eight classification tasks, showing that a second phase of pretraining indomain (domain-adaptive pretraining) leads to performance gains, under both high-and low-resource settings. Moreover, adapting to the task's unlabeled data (task-adaptive pretraining) improves performance even after domain-adaptive pretraining. Finally, we show that adapting to a task corpus augmented using simple data selection strategies is an effective alternative, especially when resources for domain-adaptive pretraining might be unavailable. Overall, we consistently find that multiphase adaptive pretraining offers large gains in task performance.

在维持预审预定序列模型的灵活性的同时，是否有利于常识性推理，这仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。为了调查这个问题，我们开发了生成的知识提示，该提示包括从语言模型中生成知识，然后在回答问题时提供知识作为附加输入。我们的方法不需要特定于任务的监督知识集成或访问结构化的知识库，但它可以提高四个常识性推理任务上的大规模，最先进的模型的性能，从而实现最先进-ART结果取决于数值常识（NumerSense），通用常识性（Commonsenseqa 2.0）和科学常识（QASC）基准。产生的知识促使大型语言模型是灵活的外部知识来源，以改善常识性推理。我们的代码可从https://github.com/liujch1998/gkp获得

Despite their impressive performance on diverse tasks, large language models (LMs) still struggle with tasks requiring rich world knowledge, implying the limitations of relying solely on their parameters to encode a wealth of world knowledge. This paper aims to understand LMs' strengths and limitations in memorizing factual knowledge, by conducting large-scale knowledge probing experiments of 10 models and 4 augmentation methods on PopQA, our new open-domain QA dataset with 14k questions. We find that LMs struggle with less popular factual knowledge, and that scaling fails to appreciably improve memorization of factual knowledge in the tail. We then show that retrieval-augmented LMs largely outperform orders of magnitude larger LMs, while unassisted LMs remain competitive in questions about high-popularity entities. Based on those findings, we devise a simple, yet effective, method for powerful and efficient retrieval-augmented LMs, which retrieves non-parametric memories only when necessary. Experimental results show that this significantly improves models' performance while reducing the inference costs.

Multilingual Pretrained Language Models (MPLMs) have shown their strong multilinguality in recent empirical cross-lingual transfer studies. In this paper, we propose the Prompts Augmented by Retrieval Crosslingually (PARC) pipeline to improve the zero-shot performance on low-resource languages (LRLs) by augmenting the context with semantically similar sentences retrieved from a high-resource language (HRL) as prompts. PARC improves the zero-shot performance on three downstream tasks (binary sentiment classification, topic categorization and natural language inference) with multilingual parallel test sets across 10 LRLs covering 6 language families in both unlabeled settings (+5.1%) and labeled settings (+16.3%). PARC-labeled also outperforms the finetuning baseline by 3.7%. We find a significant positive correlation between cross-lingual transfer performance on one side, and the similarity between the high- and low-resource languages as well as the amount of low-resource pretraining data on the other side. A robustness analysis suggests that PARC has the potential to achieve even stronger performance with more powerful MPLMs.

Retrieval-augmented in-context learning has emerged as a powerful approach for addressing knowledge-intensive tasks using frozen language models (LM) and retrieval models (RM). Existing work has combined these in simple "retrieve-then-read" pipelines in which the RM retrieves passages that are inserted into the LM prompt. To begin to fully realize the potential of frozen LMs and RMs, we propose Demonstrate-Search-Predict (DSP), a framework that relies on passing natural language texts in sophisticated pipelines between an LM and an RM. DSP can express high-level programs that bootstrap pipeline-aware demonstrations, search for relevant passages, and generate grounded predictions, systematically breaking down problems into small transformations that the LM and RM can handle more reliably. We have written novel DSP programs for answering questions in open-domain, multi-hop, and conversational settings, establishing in early evaluations new state-of-the-art in-context learning results and delivering 37-200%, 8-40%, and 80-290% relative gains against vanilla LMs, a standard retrieve-then-read pipeline, and a contemporaneous self-ask pipeline, respectively.

许多最新的自然语言任务方法都建立在大型语言模型的非凡能力上。大型语言模型可以执行内在的学习，他们可以从几个任务演示中学习新任务，而无需任何参数更新。这项工作研究了对新自然语言任务的数据集创建数据集的含义。与最近的文化学习方法背道而驰，我们制定了一个注释效率的两步框架：选择性注释，选择一个示例池，以提前从未标记的数据中从未标记的数据中进行注释，然后及时检索从注释的池中检索任务示例测试时间。基于此框架，我们提出了一种无监督的，基于图的选择性注释方法VOKE-K，以选择各种代表性的示例进行注释。在10个数据集上进行了广泛的实验（涵盖分类，常识性推理，对话和文本/代码生成）表明，我们的选择性注释方法通过很大的利润提高了任务性能。与随机选择示例进行注释相比，Pote-K平均在注释预算下获得了12.9％/11.4％的相对增益。与最先进的监督登录方法相比，它的性能相似，而在10个任务中的注释成本降低了10-100倍。我们在各种情况下进一步分析了框架的有效性：具有不同大小的语言模型，替代选择性注释方法以及有测试数据域移动的情况。我们希望我们的研究将作为数据注释的基础，因为大型语言模型越来越多地应用于新任务。我们的代码可在https://github.com/hkunlp/icl-selactive-annotation上找到。

In-context learning has shown great success in i.i.d semantic parsing splits, where the training and test sets are drawn from the same distribution. In this setup, models are typically prompted with demonstrations that are similar to the input question. However, in the setup of compositional generalization, where models are tested on outputs with structures that are absent from the training set, selecting similar demonstrations is insufficient, as often no example will be similar enough to the input. In this work, we propose a method to select diverse demonstrations that aims to collectively cover all of the structures required in the output program, in order to encourage the model to generalize to new structures from these demonstrations. We empirically show that combining diverse demonstrations with in-context learning substantially improves performance across three compositional generalization semantic parsing datasets in the pure in-context learning setup and when combined with finetuning.

本文探讨了提高语言模型的零次学习能力的简单方法。我们表明，指令调整 - 通过对说明书中所述的任务集合微调语言模型 - 大幅提升零射门上看不见任务中的表现。我们采取预训练的语言模型和指令调整它通过自然语言指令模板语言表达了60NLP任务137B参数。我们评估这种指令调整模型，我们称之为FLAN，在看不见的任务类型。FLAN显着改善其未修饰的对应的性能和超过25的20个任务，我们评估零射门175BGPT-3。FLAN甚至GPT-3通过在安利，RTE，BoolQ，AI2-ARC，OpenbookQA和StoryCloze大比分胜过几拍。消融研究显示任务和模型的规模，这个数字是指令调整取得成功的关键组成部分。