English

Self-ICL: Zero-Shot In-Context Learning with Self-Generated Demonstrations

Computation and Language 2023-10-24 v2

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited striking in-context learning (ICL) ability to adapt to target tasks with a few input-output demonstrations. For better ICL, different methods are proposed to select representative demonstrations from existing training corpora. However, such settings are not aligned with real-world practices, as end-users usually query LMs without access to demonstration pools. In this work, we introduce Self-ICL -- a simple framework which bootstraps LMs' intrinsic capabilities to perform zero-shot ICL. Given a test input, Self-ICL first prompts the model to generate pseudo-inputs. Next, the model predicts pseudo-labels for the pseudo-inputs via zero-shot prompting. Finally, we perform ICL for the test input with the pseudo-input-label pairs as demonstrations. Evaluation on 23 BIG-Bench Hard tasks shows Self-ICL outperforms zero-shot baselines on both average accuracy and head-to-head comparison. Moreover, with zero-shot chain-of-thought, Self-ICL achieves results comparable to using real demonstrations. Additionally, we conduct a range of analyses to validate Self-ICL's effectiveness and provide insights for its behaviors under different settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.15035,
  title  = {Self-ICL: Zero-Shot In-Context Learning with Self-Generated Demonstrations},
  author = {Wei-Lin Chen and Cheng-Kuang Wu and Yun-Nung Chen and Hsin-Hsi Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.15035},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted as a long paper at EMNLP 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:44:26.240Z