Hanlin Zhang, YiFan Zhang, Yaodong Yu, Dhruv Madeka, Dean Foster, Eric Xing, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Sham Kakade
| Challenge: | Prior research has demonstrated improvements in the calibration of language models (LMs) in-context learning is a popular method for adapting static LMs to safety-critical domains. |
| Approach: | They use in-context learning to adapt static language models through tailored prompts to a wide range of tasks and find that miscalibration occurs in low-shot settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibrations show that models exhibit increased miscalibration before achieving better calibration in low-shot settings. |
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Large Language Models are Miscalibrated In-Context Learners (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning have emerged as pre-dominant methodologies for machine learning and NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose to use self-ensembling to improve both performance and calibration of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigms can achieve better calibration and better performance than the previous learning paradigm. |
Generative Calibration for In-context Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning is one of the most exciting features of large language models . performance is sensitive to various configurations of the prompt, such as the choice or order of the training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to calibrate the in-context predictive distribution by adjusting the label marginal . they find that the proposed method outperforms the ICL and state-of-the-art calibration methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 27% absolute in macro-F1. |
A Survey on In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing . large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to learn from a few examples . |
| Approach: | They propose to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
Deeper Insights Without Updates: The Power of In-Context Learning Over Fine-Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Fine-tuning and in-context learning are two prevalent methods in imbuing large language models with task-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a circuit shift theory to explain why in-context learning is superior to fine-tuning for tasks with implicit patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can grasp deep patterns and significantly improve accuracy on implicit patterns, compared with fine-tuning and in-context learning. |
In-context Learning Generalizes, But Not Always Robustly: The Case of Syntax (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning is a common method for teaching large language models new tasks . given labeled examples in the input context, the model learns to perform the task without weight updates. |
| Approach: | They examine whether models guided via ICL infer the underlying structure of the task defined by the context or rely on superficial heuristics that only generalize to identically distributed examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generalizes syntactically or linearly on out-of-distribution examples . the proposed model is able to generalize better on pre-trained models . |
Surprise Calibration for Better In-Context Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for in-context learning apply fixed class priors across all inputs . existing methods rely on retraining and retrain models . |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian-based method to capture the temporal dynamics of class priors . they identify "surprise" as an informative signal for class prior shift . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on a range of benchmark tasks. |
How Far Can In-Context Alignment Go? Exploring the State of In-Context Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that In-Context Learning (ICA) can align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences without requiring parameter adjustments. |
| Approach: | They investigate the effectiveness of each part in enabling ICA to function effectively and examine how variants in these parts impact alignment performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can comprehend human instructions without parameter adjustments. |
Using Natural Language Explanations to Improve Robustness of In-context Learning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that large language models excel in many tasks via in-context learning (ICL). However, ICL struggles to execute complex tasks such as arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment ICL with natural language explanations (NLEs) to produce further NLEs on adversarial datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields more accurate results than zero-shot-ICL and using only human-generated NLEs on eight adversarial datasets. |
Knowledgeable In-Context Tuning: Exploring and Exploiting Factual Knowledge for In-Context Learning (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored multiple aspects that affect the performance of large language models (LLMs) such as input-output mapping, extensive data resources, and the ability to train on labeled examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that injects knowledge into LLMs during continual self-supervised pre-training and judiciously selects examples with high knowledge relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and improves by more than 13% and 7% on text classification and question-answering tasks. |
Fine-tuning vs. In-context Learning in Large Language Models: A Formal Language Learning Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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Bishwamittra Ghosh, Soumi Das, Till Speicher, Qinyuan Wu, Mohammad Aflah Khan, Deepak Garg, Krishna P. Gummadi, Evimaria Terzi
| Challenge: | Prior studies comparing FT and ICL have yielded mixed and inconclusive results due to inconsistent experimental setups. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal language learning task with precise language boundaries, controlled string sampling, and no data contamination to enable a rigorous comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task offers precise language boundaries, controlled string sampling, and no data contamination. |