With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It has been a significant 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, prompt designing strategies, and related analysis. Additionally, we explore various ICL application scenarios, such as data engineering and knowledge updating. Finally, we address the challenges of ICL and suggest potential directions for further research. We hope that our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL.

Frame identification aims to find semantic frames associated with target words in a sentence. Recent researches measure the similarity or matching score between targets and candidate frames by modeling frame definitions. However, they either lack sufficient representation learning of the definitions or face challenges in efficiently selecting the most suitable frame from over 1000 candidate frames. Moreover, commonly used lexicon filtering (lf) to obtain candidate frames for the target may ignore out-of-vocabulary targets and cause inadequate frame modeling. In this paper, we propose CoFFTEA, a  ̲Coarse-to- ̲Fine  ̲Frame and  ̲Target  ̲Encoders  ̲Architecture. With contrastive learning and dual encoders, CoFFTEA efficiently and effectively models the alignment between frames and targets. By employing a coarse-to-fine curriculum learning procedure, CoFFTEA gradually learns to differentiate frames with varying degrees of similarity. Experimental results demonstrate that CoFFTEA outperforms previous models by 0.93 overall scores and 1.53 R@1 without lf. Further analysis suggests that CoFFTEA can better model the relationships between frame and frame, as well as target and target. The code for our approach is available at https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/COFFTEA.

Previous studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) like GPTs store massive factual knowledge in their parameters. However, the stored knowledge could be false or outdated. Traditional knowledge editing methods refine LLMs via fine-tuning on texts containing specific knowledge. However, with the increasing scales of LLMs, these gradient-based approaches bring large computation costs. The trend of model-as-a-service also makes it impossible to modify knowledge in black-box LMs. Inspired by in-context learning (ICL), a new paradigm based on demonstration contexts without parameter updating, we explore whether ICL can edit factual knowledge. To answer this question, we give a comprehensive empirical study of ICL strategies. Experiments show that in-context knowledge editing (IKE), without any gradient and parameter updating, achieves a competitive success rate compared to gradient-based methods on GPT-J (6B) but with much fewer side effects, including less over-editing on similar but unrelated facts and less knowledge forgetting on previously stored knowledge. We also apply the method to larger LMs with tens or hundreds of parameters like OPT-175B, which shows the scalability of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/IKE.

Language models (LMs) gradually become general-purpose interfaces in the interactive and embodied world, where the understanding of physical concepts is an essential prerequisite. However, it is unclear whether LMs can understand physical concepts in the human world. To investigate this, we design a benchmark VEC that covers the tasks of (i) Visual concepts, such as the shape and material of objects, and (ii) Embodied Concepts, learned from the interaction with the world such as the temperature of objects. Our zero (few)-shot prompting results show that the understanding of certain visual concepts emerges as scaling up LMs, but there are still basic concepts to which the scaling law does not apply. For example, OPT-175B performs close to humans with a zero-shot accuracy of 85% on the material concept, yet behaves like random guessing on the mass concept. Instead, vision-augmented LMs such as CLIP and BLIP achieve a human-level understanding of embodied concepts. Analysis indicates that the rich semantics in visual representation can serve as a valuable source of embodied knowledge. Inspired by this, we propose a distillation method to transfer embodied knowledge from VLMs to LMs, achieving performance gain comparable with that by scaling up parameters of LMs 134×. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/TobiasLee/VEC.

Frame semantic parsing is a fundamental NLP task, which consists of three subtasks: frame identification, argument identification and role classification. Most previous studies tend to neglect relations between different subtasks and arguments and pay little attention to ontological frame knowledge defined in FrameNet. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-guided Incremental semantic parser with Double-graph (KID). We first introduce Frame Knowledge Graph (FKG), a heterogeneous graph containing both frames and FEs (Frame Elements) built on the frame knowledge so that we can derive knowledge-enhanced representations for frames and FEs. Besides, we propose Frame Semantic Graph (FSG) to represent frame semantic structures extracted from the text with graph structures. In this way, we can transform frame semantic parsing into an incremental graph construction problem to strengthen interactions between subtasks and relations between arguments. Our experiments show that KID outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by up to 1.7 F1-score on two FrameNet datasets. Our code is availavle at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/KID.

“框架语义分析任务是自然语言处理领域的一项基础性任务。先前的研究工作大多针对单目标词进行模型设计,无法一次性完成多个目标词的框架语义结构提取。本文提出了一个面向多目标的框架语义分析模型,实现对多目标词的联合预测。该模型对框架语义分析的各项子任务进行交互性建模,实现子任务间的双向交互。此外,本文利用关系图网络对框架关系信息进行编码,将其作为框架语义学知识融入模型中。实验表明,本文模型在不借助额外语料的情况下相比之前模型都有不同程度的提高。消融实验证明了本文模型设计的有效性。此外我们分析了模型目前存在的局限性以及未来的改进方向。”