Rethinking the Role of Scale for In-Context Learning: An Interpretability-based Case Study at 66 Billion Scale

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09095v2
• Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2023 09:09:53 GMT
• Title: Rethinking the Role of Scale for In-Context Learning: An Interpretability-based Case Study at 66 Billion Scale
• Authors: Hritik Bansal, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Saket Dingliwal, Sravan Bodapati, Katrin Kirchhoff, Dan Roth
• Abstract summary: We investigate the hypothesis that the ability of a large language model to in-context learn-perform a task is not uniformly spread across its underlying components. We find substantial overlap in the set of attention heads (unimportant) for in-context learning across tasks and number of in-context examples.
• Score: 60.336655143884904
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Language models have been shown to perform better with an increase in scale on a wide variety of tasks via the in-context learning paradigm. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the ability of a large language model to in-context learn-perform a task is not uniformly spread across all of its underlying components. Using a 66 billion parameter language model (OPT-66B) across a diverse set of 14 downstream tasks, we find this is indeed the case: $\sim$70% of attention heads and $\sim$20% of feed forward networks can be removed with minimal decline in task performance. We find substantial overlap in the set of attention heads (un)important for in-context learning across tasks and number of in-context examples. We also address our hypothesis through a task-agnostic lens, finding that a small set of attention heads in OPT-66B score highly on their ability to perform primitive induction operations associated with in-context learning, namely, prefix matching and copying. These induction heads overlap with task-specific important heads, reinforcing arguments by Olsson et al. (arXiv:2209.11895) regarding induction head generality to more sophisticated behaviors associated with in-context learning. Overall, our study provides several insights that indicate large language models may be under-trained for in-context learning and opens up questions on how to pre-train language models to more effectively perform in-context learning.

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