Structured Prompting: Scaling In-context Learning To 1,000 Examples

Yaru Hao, Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Zhixiong Han, Yuxian Gu, Furu Wei. Arxiv 2022

[Paper] [Code]    
Attention Mechanism Few Shot Has Code In Context Learning Model Architecture Prompting Transformer

Large language models have exhibited intriguing in-context learning capability, achieving promising zero- and few-shot performance without updating the parameters. However, conventional in-context learning is usually restricted by length constraints, rendering it ineffective to absorb supervision from a large number of examples. In order to go beyond few shots, we introduce structured prompting that breaks the length limit and scales in-context learning to thousands of examples. Specifically, demonstration examples are separately encoded with well-designed position embeddings, and then they are jointly attended by the test example using a rescaled attention mechanism. So we can scale the number of exemplars with linear complexity instead of quadratic complexity with respect to length. Experimental results on a diverse set of tasks show that our approach improves end-task performance and reduces evaluation variance over conventional in-context learning as the number of demonstration examples increases. Code has been released at https://aka.ms/structured-prompting.

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