Let Me Check the Examples: Enhancing Demonstration Learning via Explicit Imitation

Sirui Wang, Kaiwen Wei, Hongzhi Zhang, Yuntao Li, Wei Wu


Abstract
Demonstration learning aims to guide the prompt prediction by providing answered demonstrations in the few shot settings. Despite achieving promising results, existing work only concatenates the answered examples as demonstrations to the prompt template (including the raw context) without any additional operation, neglecting the prompt-demonstration dependencies. Besides, prior research found that randomly replacing the labels of demonstrations marginally hurts performance, illustrating that the model could not properly learn the knowledge brought by the demonstrations. Inspired by the human learning process, in this paper, we introduce Imitation DEMOnstration learning (Imitation-Demo) to strengthen demonstration learning via explicitly imitating human review behaviour, which includes: (1) contrastive learning mechanism to concentrate on similar demonstrations.(2) demonstration-label re-prediction method to consolidate known knowledge. Experiment results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 out of 14 classification corpus. Further studies also prove that Imitation-Demo strengthens the associations between the prompt and demonstrations, which could provide the basis for exploring how demonstration learning works.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.93
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1080–1088
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.93
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.93
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sirui Wang, Kaiwen Wei, Hongzhi Zhang, Yuntao Li, and Wei Wu. 2023. Let Me Check the Examples: Enhancing Demonstration Learning via Explicit Imitation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 1080–1088, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Let Me Check the Examples: Enhancing Demonstration Learning via Explicit Imitation (Wang et al., ACL 2023)
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