Implicit In-context Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14660v1
• Date: Thu, 23 May 2024 14:57:52 GMT
• Title: Implicit In-context Learning
• Authors: Zhuowei Li, Zihao Xu, Ligong Han, Yunhe Gao, Song Wen, Di Liu, Hao Wang, Dimitris N. Metaxas,
• Abstract summary: In-context Learning (ICL) empowers large language models to adapt to unseen tasks during inference by prefixing a few demonstration examples prior to test queries. We introduce Implicit In-context Learning (I2CL), an innovative paradigm that addresses the challenges associated with traditional ICL by absorbing demonstration examples within the activation space. I2CL achieves few-shot performance with zero-shot cost and exhibits robustness against the variation of demonstration examples.
• Score: 37.0562059811099
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In-context Learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to adapt to unseen tasks during inference by prefixing a few demonstration examples prior to test queries. Despite its versatility, ICL incurs substantial computational and memory overheads compared to zero-shot learning and is susceptible to the selection and order of demonstration examples. In this work, we introduce Implicit In-context Learning (I2CL), an innovative paradigm that addresses the challenges associated with traditional ICL by absorbing demonstration examples within the activation space. I2CL first generates a condensed vector representation, namely a context vector, from the demonstration examples. It then integrates the context vector during inference by injecting a linear combination of the context vector and query activations into the model's residual streams. Empirical evaluation on nine real-world tasks across three model architectures demonstrates that I2CL achieves few-shot performance with zero-shot cost and exhibits robustness against the variation of demonstration examples. Furthermore, I2CL facilitates a novel representation of "task-ids", enhancing task similarity detection and enabling effective transfer learning. We provide a comprehensive analysis of I2CL, offering deeper insights into its mechanisms and broader implications for ICL. The source code is available at: https://github.com/LzVv123456/I2CL.

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