Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful analytical tool in mechanistic interpretability for large language models (LLMs), with growing success in applications beyond interpretability. Building on this momentum, we present a novel approach that leverages SAEs to enhance the general in-context learning (ICL) performance of LLMs. Specifically, we introduce Feature Detection through Prompt Variation (FDPV), which leverages the SAE’s remarkable ability to capture subtle differences between prompts, enabling efficient feature selection for downstream steering. In addition, we propose a novel steering method tailored to ICL—Selective In-Context Steering (SISTER)—grounded in recent insights from ICL research that LLMs utilize label words as key anchors. Our method yields a 3.5% average performance improvement across diverse text classification tasks and exhibits greater robustness to hyperparameter variations compared to standard steering approaches.

Toward Efficient Sparse Autoencoder-Guided Steering for Improved In-Context Learning in Large Language Models

First-order logic (FOL) is often used to represent logical entailment, but determining natural language (NL) entailment using FOL remains a challenge. To address this, we propose the Entailment-Preserving FOL representations (EPF) task and introduce reference-free evaluation metrics for EPF (Entailment-Preserving Rate (EPR) family). In EPF, one should generate FOL representations from multi-premise NL entailment data (e.g., EntailmentBank) so that the automatic prover's result preserves the entailment labels. Furthermore, we propose a training method specialized for the task, iterative learning-to-rank, which trains an NL-to-FOL translator by using the natural language entailment labels as verifiable rewards. Our method achieves a 1.8–2.7% improvement in EPR and a 17.4–20.6% increase in EPR@16 compared to diverse baselines in three datasets. Further analyses reveal that iterative learning-to-rank effectively suppresses the arbitrariness of FOL representation by reducing the diversity of predicate signatures, and maintains strong performance across diverse inference types and out-of-domain data.

Entailment-Preserving First-order Logic Representations in Natural Language Entailment

There has been a growing body of work focusing on the in-context learning (ICL) abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, it is an open question how effective ICL can be. This paper presents Tutor-ICL, a simple prompting method for classification tasks inspired by how effective instructors might engage their students in learning a task. Specifically, we propose presenting exemplar answers in a *comparative format* rather than the traditional single-answer format. We also show that including the test instance before the exemplars can improve performance, making it easier for LLMs to focus on relevant exemplars. Lastly, we include a summarization step before attempting the test, following a common human practice. Experiments on various classification tasks, conducted across both decoder-only LLMs (Llama 2, 3) and encoder-decoder LLMs (Flan-T5-XL, XXL), show that Tutor-ICL consistently boosts performance, achieving up to a 13.76% increase in accuracy.

Tutor-ICL: Guiding Large Language Models for Improved In-Context Learning Performance

We present a simple, but effective method to incorporate syntactic dependency information directly into transformer-based language models (e.g. RoBERTa) for tasks such as Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification (ABSC), where the desired output depends on specific input tokens. In contrast to prior approaches to ABSC that capture syntax by combining language models with graph neural networks over dependency trees, our model, Syntax-Integrated RoBERTa for ABSC (SIR-ABSC) incorporates syntax directly into the language model by using a novel aggregator token. Yet, SIR-ABSC outperforms these more complex models, yielding new state-of-the-art results on ABSC.

SIR-ABSC: Incorporating Syntax into RoBERTa-based Sentiment Analysis Models with a Special Aggregator Token

Transformer-based encoder-decoder models that generate outputs in a left-to-right fashion have become standard for sequence-to-sequence tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework for decoding that produces sequences from the "outside-in": at each step, the model chooses to generate a token on the left, on the right, or join the left and right sequences. We argue that this is more principled than prior bidirectional decoders. Our proposal supports a variety of model architectures and includes several training methods, such as a dynamic programming algorithm that marginalizes out the latent ordering variable. Our model sets state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the 2022 and 2023 shared tasks, beating the next best systems by over 4.7 and 2.7 points in average accuracy respectively. The model performs particularly well on long sequences, can implicitly learn the split point of words composed of stem and affix, and performs better relative to the baseline on datasets that have fewer unique lemmas.

A Framework for Bidirectional Decoding: Case Study in Morphological Inflection

Much of the current progress in our field seems to be driven by a small number of industry labs that have access to computing resources, data, and financial backing on a scale that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago (and that remain unattainable for the majority of researchers in academia or industry). However, many of the datasets that have defined novel tasks and that have catalyzed research on new problems came out of much more modest efforts by academic researchers. I will focus on the work that my own group has done on image description and on grounded instruction giving/following in Minecraft as examples of how this kind of work has helped drive scientific progress.  

How new tasks and datasets have enabled progress in NLP

Goal-oriented generative script learning aims to generate subsequent steps to reach a particular goal, which is an essential task to assist robots or humans in performing stereotypical activities. An important aspect of this process is the ability to capture historical states visually, which provides detailed information that is not covered by text and will guide subsequent steps. Therefore, we propose a new task, Multimedia Generative Script Learning, to generate subsequent steps by tracking historical states in both text and vision modalities, as well as presenting the first benchmark containing 5,652 tasks and 79,089 multimedia steps. This task is challenging in three aspects: the multimedia challenge of capturing the visual states in images, the induction challenge of performing unseen tasks, and the diversity challenge of covering different information in individual steps. We propose to encode visual state changes through a selective multimedia encoder to address the multimedia challenge, transfer knowledge from previously observed tasks using a retrieval-augmented decoder to overcome the induction challenge, and further present distinct information at each step by optimizing a diversity-oriented contrastive learning objective. We define metrics to evaluate both generation and inductive quality. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines.

Multimedia Generative Script Learning for Task Planning

Goal-oriented generative script learning aims to generate subsequent steps to reach a particular goal, which is an essential task to assist robots or humans in performing stereotypical activities. An important aspect of this process is the ability to capture historical states visually, which provides detailed information that is not covered by text and will guide subsequent steps. Therefore, we propose a new task, Multimedia Generative Script Learning, to generate subsequent steps by tracking historical states in both text and vision modalities, as well as presenting the first benchmark containing 5,652 tasks and 79,089 multimedia steps. This task is challenging in three aspects: the multimedia challenge of capturing the visual states in images, the induction challenge of performing unseen tasks, and the diversity challenge of covering different information in individual steps. We propose to encode visual state changes through a selective multimedia encoder to address the multimedia challenge, transfer knowledge from previously observed tasks using a retrieval-augmented decoder to overcome the induction challenge, and further present distinct information at each step by optimizing a diversity-oriented contrastive learning objective. We define metrics to evaluate both generation and inductive quality. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines

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Text-to-Graph extraction aims to automatically extract information graphs consisting of mentions and types from natural language texts. Existing approaches, such as table filling and pairwise scoring, have shown impressive performance on various information extraction tasks, but they are difficult to scale to datasets with longer input texts because of their second-order space/time complexities with respect to the input length. In this work, we propose a Hybrid Span Generator (HySPA) that invertibly maps the information graph to an alternating sequence of nodes and edge types, and directly generates such sequences via a hybrid span decoder which can decode both the spans and the types recurrently in linear time and space complexities. Extensive experiments on the ACE05 dataset show that our approach also significantly outperforms state-of-the-art on the joint entity and relation extraction task.

Julia Hockenmaier

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