Large language models (LLMs) excel at few-shot in-context learning (ICL) without requiring parameter updates. However, as ICL demonstrations increase from a few to many, performance tends to plateau and eventually decline. We identify two primary causes for this trend: the suboptimal negative log-likelihood (NLL) optimization objective and the incremental data noise. To address these issues, we introduce DrICL, a novel optimization method that enhances model performance through Differentiated and Reweighting objectives. Globally, DrICL utilizes differentiated learning to optimize the NLL objective, ensuring that many-shot performance surpasses zero-shot levels. Locally, it dynamically adjusts the weighting of many-shot demonstrations by leveraging cumulative advantages inspired by reinforcement learning, thereby mitigating the impact of noisy data.Recognizing the lack of multi-task datasets with diverse many-shot distributions, we develop the Many-Shot ICL Benchmark (ICL-50)-a large-scale benchmark of 50 tasks that cover shot numbers from 1 to 350 within sequences of up to 8,000 tokens-for both fine-tuning and evaluation purposes.Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs enhanced with DrICL achieve significant improvements in many-shot setups across various tasks, including both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios.We release the code and dataset hoping to facilitate further research in many-shot ICL.

Code generation is crucial in software engineering for automating the coding process efficiently. While test-time computation methods show promise, they suffer from high latency due to multiple computation rounds.To overcome this, we introduce ThinkCoder, a framework that combines thorough exploration with optimal refinement.The exploration phase diversifies the solution space by searching for potential solutions, followed by a refinement phase that enhances precision.This approach allows us to select the best solution through careful consideration before taking action, avoiding excessive trial and error.To further minimize test-time computation overhead, we introduce preference-driven optimization with Reinforced Self-Training (ReST), which uses exploration trajectories from ThinkCoder to guide LLM’s evolution.This approach enhances LLM’s exploration efficiency via preference learning, cutting costs while maintaining accuracy.ThinkCoder boosts the performance with a single LLM, excelling on benchmarks like HumanEval and MBPP. Compared to SOTA models, it improves Pass@1 by 3.0% over MapCoder with just 6.4% of the computation cost.Against AgentCoder, ThinkCoder achieves a 0.5% higher Pass@1 after 2 rounds, outperforming AgentCoder’s 5 rounds.Additionally, ReST with success trajectories enhances efficiency, allowing models like LLaMA2-7B to achieve competitive results using only 20% of the computational resources. These results highlight the framework’s effectiveness and scalability.