Meta-learning via Language Model In-context Tuning

Yanda Chen, Ruiqi Zhong, Sheng Zha, George Karypis, He He

Abstract
The goal of meta-learning is to learn to adapt to a new task with only a few labeled examples. Inspired by the recent progress in large language models, we propose in-context tuning (ICT), which recasts task adaptation and prediction as a simple sequence prediction problem: to form the input sequence, we concatenate the task instruction, labeled in-context examples, and the target input to predict; to meta-train the model to learn from in-context examples, we fine-tune a pre-trained language model (LM) to predict the target label given the input sequence on a collection of tasks.We benchmark our method on two collections of text classification tasks: LAMA and BinaryClfs. Compared to MAML which adapts the model through gradient descent, our method leverages the inductive bias of pre-trained LMs to perform pattern matching, and outperforms MAML by an absolute 6% average AUC-ROC score on BinaryClfs, gaining more advantage with increasing model size. Compared to non-fine-tuned in-context learning (i.e. prompting a raw LM), in-context tuning meta-trains the model to learn from in-context examples. On BinaryClfs, ICT improves the average AUC-ROC score by an absolute 10%, and reduces the variance due to example ordering by 6x and example choices by 2x.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.53
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
719–730
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.53
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.53
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yanda Chen, Ruiqi Zhong, Sheng Zha, George Karypis, and He He. 2022. Meta-learning via Language Model In-context Tuning. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 719–730, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Meta-learning via Language Model In-context Tuning (Chen et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl-24-ws-corrections/2022.acl-long.53.pdf
Code
 yandachen/in-context-tuning
Data
LAMA
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