Unraveling the Mechanics of Learning-Based Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods integrate task-agnostic similarities of different levels between input and output of exemplars and test cases to eliminate costly data collection. |
Similar Papers
Revisiting Demonstration Selection Strategies in In-Context Learning (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves language understanding and generation tasks with different model scales. |
What In-Context Learning “Learns” In-Context: Disentangling Task Recognition and Task Learning (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can perform in-context learning (ICL) with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not well-understood. |
| Approach: | They characterize two ways in which LLMs leverage demonstrations to solve tasks with a few demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves non-trivial performance with only TR, and TR does not improve with larger models or more demonstrations. |
In-Context Learning with Iterative Demonstration Selection (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
| Approach: | They propose to use zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning to iteratively select examples that are diverse but still strongly correlated with the test sample as ICL demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing demonstration selection methods on reasoning, question answering, and topic classification tasks. |
From Introspection to Best Practices: Principled Analysis of Demonstrations in Multimodal In-Context Learning (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Motivated by in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), multimodal LLMs with additional visual modality are also exhibited with similar ICL abilities when multiple image-text pairs are provided as demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They conduct systematic and principled evaluation of multimodal ICL for models of different scales on a broad spectrum of new yet critical tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performance improves on a broad spectrum of new yet critical tasks. |
Label Words as Local Task Vectors in In-Context Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities, one of the most important being in-context learning (ICL). |
| Approach: | They hypothesized that the network creates a task vector in specific positions during ICL, which can be computed by averaging across the dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve zero-shot performance with dummy inputs comparable to few-shot learning by patching the global task vector. |
Unveiling In-Context Learning: A Coordinate System to Understand Its Working Mechanism (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, but the underlying working mechanism of ICL remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a Two-Dimensional Coordinate System that unifies both views into a systematic framework that explains the behavior of ICL through two orthogonal variables: whether similar examples are presented in the demonstrations and whether LLMs can recognize the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can interpret ICL for generation tasks effectively. |
Revisiting In-Context Learning with Long Context Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is a technique by which language models make predictions based on examples provided in their input context. |
| Approach: | They revisited previous studies using in-context learning techniques . they found that using a data augmentation approach, they significantly improved ICL performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves ICL performance on 18 datasets spanning 4 tasks . the proposed approach does not improve performance over a simple random sample selection method . |
What Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis. (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained large language models have exhibited an impressive ability to learn in context across various domains, e.g., code generation, education, medicine and even medicine. |
| Approach: | They taxonomize existing candidate theories into three competing hypotheses that explain LLMs’ ability to learn in context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn a task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration and generalize it to the prompt. |
Active Learning Principles for In-Context Learning with Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning has significantly enhanced predictive performance in few-shot learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pool-based Active Learning to identify the most informative demonstrations for few-shot learning over a single iteration to identify best demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all other methods, including random sampling, in the analysis of 24 classification and multi-choice tasks. |
Not All Demonstration Examples are Equally Beneficial: Reweighting Demonstration Examples for In-Context Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained the In-Context Learning ability . however, the quality of demonstration examples is usually uneven . |
| Approach: | They propose to determine optimal weights for demonstration examples and apply them during ICL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms conventional ICL on 8 classification tasks. |