Title: A Survey on In-context Learning
Authors: Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Jingjing Xu, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
Published: 31st December 2022 (Saturday) @ 15:57:09
Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00234v2
Abstract
With the increasing ability of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has become a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions only based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It has been a new trend to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress and challenges of ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques, including training strategies, demonstration designing strategies, as well as related analysis. Finally, we discuss the challenges of ICL and provide potential directions for further research. We hope that our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL.