Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) can use in-context demonstrations to improve performance on zero-shot tasks.
Approach: They propose a cross-entropy difference method for selecting in-context demonstrations that uses parameter efficient finetuning to train small models on training data.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline selection methods on a mix-domain dataset and shows that the effectiveness of in-context demonstrations negatively correlates with the perplexity of the test example.

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Unraveling the Mechanics of Learning-Based Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent learning-based demonstration selection methods have proven beneficial to in-context learning (ICL) by choosing more useful exemplars.
Approach: They propose two methods to capture task-agnostic similarities between input and output of LLMs.
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In-Context Learning with Iterative Demonstration Selection (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing literature has highlighted the importance of selecting examples that are diverse or semantically similar to the test sample . Existing studies have shown that the optimal selection dimension, i.e., diversity or similarity, is task-specific.
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Revisiting Demonstration Selection Strategies in In-Context Learning (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown an impressive ability to perform a wide range of tasks using in-context learning (ICL).
Approach: They propose a data- and model-dependent method to select models using in-context learning, TopK + ConE, and propose unified explanations for the effectiveness of previous methods.
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Selective Demonstrations for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models with in-context learning have demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities in the cross-domain text-to-SQL task without the use of in-domain annotations.
Approach: They propose a demonstration selection framework that utilizes both out-of-domain examples and synthetically generated in-domain demonstration examples to construct demonstrations.
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Selecting Demonstrations for Many-Shot In-Context Learning via Gradient Matching (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models for rapid task adaptation without fine-tuning.
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D.Va: Validate Your Demonstration First Before You Use It (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) heavily relies on selecting effective demonstrations to achieve outputs that better align with the expected results.
Approach: They propose a method which integrates a demonstration validation perspective into this field and integrates it into the learning paradigm.
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Strategic Demonstration Selection for Improved Fairness in LLM In-Context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of using in-context learning (ICL) to steer large language models in processing tabular data.
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Learning to Select In-Context Demonstration Preferred by Large Language Model (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to perform tasks with only a few examples as demonstrations.
Approach: They propose a generative preference learning framework that leverages LLM feedback to directly optimize demonstration selection for ICL.
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Language Models can Exploit Cross-Task In-context Learning for Data-Scarce Novel Tasks (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed NLP with their remarkable In-context Learning capabilities.
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BehaviorBox: Automated Discovery of Fine-Grained Performance Differences Between Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating language models are brittle, corpus-level perplexities are vague, and the choice of benchmarks is endless.
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