Although large language models can be prompted for both zero- and few-shot learning, performance drops significantly when no demonstrations are available. In this paper, we introduce Z-ICL, a new zero-shot method that closes the gap by constructing pseudo-demonstrations for a given test input using a raw text corpus. Concretely, pseudo-demonstrations are constructed by (1) finding the nearest neighbors to the test input from the corpus and pairing them with random task labels, and (2) applying a set of techniques to reduce the amount of direct copying the model does from the resulting demonstrations. Evaluation on nine classification datasets shows that Z-ICL outperforms previous zero-shot methods by a significant margin, and is on par with in-context learning with labeled training data in the few-shot setting. Overall, Z-ICL provides a significantly higher estimate of the zero-shot performance levels of a model, and supports future efforts to develop better pseudo-demonstrations that further improve zero-shot results.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/ad3e8cef-03f2-4787-b98b-545b8fafdd8a" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Z-ICL: Zero-Shot In-Context Learning with Pseudo-Demonstrations

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn—perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little understanding of how the model learns and which aspects of the demonstrations contribute to end task performance. In this paper, we show that ground truth demonstrations are in fact not required—randomly replacing labels in the demonstrations barely hurts performance on a range of classification and multi-choce tasks, consistently over 12 different models including GPT-3. Instead, we find that other aspects of the demonstrations are the key drivers of end
task performance, including the fact that they provide a few examples of (1) the label space, (2) the distribution of the input text, and (3) the overall format of the sequence. Together, our analysis provides a new way of understanding how and why in-context learning works, while opening up new questions about how much can be learned from large language models through inference alone.

Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?

Fine-tuning continuous prompts for target tasks has recently emerged as a compact alternative to full model fine-tuning. Motivated by these promising results, we investigate the feasibility of extracting a discrete (textual) interpretation of continuous prompts that is faithful to the problem they solve. In practice, we observe a "wayward" behavior between the task solved by continuous prompts and their nearest neighbor discrete projections: We can find continuous prompts that solve a task while being projected to an arbitrary text (e.g., the definition of a different or even a contradictory task) while being within a very small (2%) margin of the best continuous prompt of the same size for the task. We provide intuitions behind this odd and surprising behavior, as well as extensive empirical analyses quantifying the effect of various parameters. For instance, for larger model sizes we observe higher waywardness, i.e, we can find prompts that more closely map to any arbitrary text with a smaller drop in accuracy. These findings have important implications relating to the difficulty of faithfully interpreting continuous prompts and their generalization across models and tasks, providing guidance for future progress in prompting language models.

On Discretized Interpretation of Continuous Prompts

Poster Session 6

poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

**Topics:** Commonsense Reasoning 
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Dialogue and Interactive Systems 
Discourse and Pragmatics 
Efficient Methods for NLP 
Information Extraction 
Information Retrieval and Text Mining 
Interpretability, Interactivity and Analysis of Models for NLP 
Interpretability, Interactivity and Analysis of Models for NLP (CL) 
Language Modeling and Analysis of Language Models 
Machine Learning for NLP 
Machine Translation

Poster Session 3

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8F: Machine Learning for NLP 3

technical paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
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Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
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NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Xinxi Lyu

3

6

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Z-ICL: Zero-Shot In-Context Learning with Pseudo-Demonstrations

Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?

On Discretized Interpretation of Continuous Prompts

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