arXiv:2510.08372cs.CLcs.LG2025-10被引 1

探究提示中演示样本表示与学习能力的关系,发现二者独立影响模型表现。

On the Relationship Between the Choice of Representation and In-Context Learning

  • 通过优化算法枚举不同语义相关的标签表示方式
  • 无论标签质量如何,增加演示数均能提升性能,但效率依赖标签质量和模型参数量
  • 标签表示决定基础准确率,学习能力与其正交,适合研究ICL机制的学者

上下文学习(ICL)是大语言模型(LLM)通过少量示例在上下文中学习新任务的能力。以往研究认为,示例的表示方式(尤其是分类任务中的标签表示)是ICL成功的关键。然而,关于ICL学习能力(即更多示例是否带来更高性能)的观察结果不一,常被认为仅在特定条件下发生。本文首次系统探讨了表示与学习之间的交互关系。我们假设:表示与学习能力相互独立——表示决定基础准确率,而额外示例带来的提升仅在此基础上发生。为此,我们设计优化算法,枚举一系列语义相关性不同的标签集(表示形式),并在每种表示下测试不同数量的上下文示例。结果表明,无论标签集质量如何,增加示例均能引发学习,但提升效率由标签质量与模型参数量共同决定。更重要的是,不同表示间的相对性能差距在学习过程中保持稳定,验证了两者的正交性。本工作揭示了ICL中一个此前被忽视的维度:表示与学习的独立作用。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

In-context learning (ICL) is the ability of a large language model (LLM) to learn a new task from a few demonstrations presented as part of the context. Past studies have attributed a large portion of the success of ICL to the way these in-context demonstrations are represented, particularly to how labels are represented in classification tasks. On the other hand, observations of the learning capacity of ICL (i.e., the extent to which more in-context demonstrations can lead to higher performance) have been mixed, and ICL is often thought to occur only under specific conditions. The interaction between these two aspects in ICL, representation and learning, has not been studied in depth until now. We hypothesize that they are largely independent of one another, such that the representation of demonstrations determines the baseline accuracy of ICL, while learning from additional demonstrations improves only on top of this baseline. We validate this hypothesis by developing an optimization algorithm that can enumerate a spectrum of possible label sets (representations) varying in semantic relevance. We then perform ICL with varying numbers of in-context demonstrations for each of these label sets. We observed that learning happens regardless of the quality of the label set itself, although its efficiency, measured by the slope of improvement over in-context demonstrations, is conditioned on both the label set quality and the parameter count of the underlying language model. Despite the emergence of learning, the relative quality (accuracy) of the choice of a label set (representation) is largely maintained throughout learning, confirming our hypothesis and implying their orthogonality. Our work reveals a previously underexplored aspect of ICL: the independent effects of learning from demonstrations and their representations on ICL performance.

上下文学习表示学习大模型机制

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