Probing the Decision Boundaries of In-context Learning in Large Language Models
Keywords: Large language models, in-context learning, decision boundary, LLM decision boundary
TL;DR: We present a novel method to analyze decision boundaries in in-context learning for LLMs, finding that LLMs often produce irregular boundaries, and we proposed methods to improve boundary smoothness and generalization.
Abstract: In-context learning in large language models (LLMs) enables them to generalize to new tasks by prompting with a few exemplars without explicit parameter updates. Attempts have been made to understand in-context learning as a function of model scale, pretraining data, and other factors. In this work, we propose a new mechanism to probe and understand in-context learning from the lens of decision boundaries for in-context binary classification. Decision boundaries are straightforward to visualize and qualitatively demonstrate the inductive biases of standard classifiers. Surprisingly, we find that the decision boundaries learned by current LLMs in simple binary classification tasks are irregular and non-smooth. We investigate the factors influencing these decision boundaries and explores methods to enhance their generalizability, including training-free and fine-tuning methods, the impact of model architecture, and the effectiveness of active prompting techniques for smoothing decision boundaries in a data-efficient manner. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of in-context learning dynamics and offer practical improvements for enhancing robustness and generalizability of in-context learning.
Submission Number: 38
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