Generating Demonstrations for In-Context Compositional Generalization in Grounded Language Learning

Sam Spilsbury, Pekka Marttinen, Alexander Ilin


Abstract
In-Context-learning and few-shot prompting are viable methods compositional output generation. However, these methods can be very sensitive to the choice of support examples used. Retrieving good supports from the training data for a given test query is already a difficult problem, but in some cases solving this may not even be enough. We consider the setting of grounded language learning problems where finding relevant supports in the same or similar states as the query may be difficult. We design an agent which instead generates possible supports inputs and targets current state of the world, then uses them in-context-learning to solve the test query. We show substantially improved performance on a previously unsolved compositional generalization test without a loss of performance in other areas. The approach is general and can even scale to instructions expressed in natural language.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.893
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15960–15991
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.893
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.893
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sam Spilsbury, Pekka Marttinen, and Alexander Ilin. 2024. Generating Demonstrations for In-Context Compositional Generalization in Grounded Language Learning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15960–15991, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Demonstrations for In-Context Compositional Generalization in Grounded Language Learning (Spilsbury et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2024.emnlp-main.893.pdf