What In-Context Learning “Learns” In-Context: Disentangling Task Recognition and Task Learning
Published in Findings of ACL, 2023
…we characterize two ways through which ICL leverages demonstrations. Task recognition (TR) captures the extent to which LLMs can recognize a task through demonstrations, even without ground-truth labels, and apply their pre-trained priors, whereas task learning (TL) is the ability to capture new input-label mappings unseen in pre-training. Using a wide range of classification datasets and three LLM families (GPT-3, LLaMA and OPT), we design controlled experiments to disentangle the roles of TR and TL in ICL…
Recommended citation: Pan, J., Gao, T., Chen, H., & Chen, D. (2023). What In-Context Learning "Learns" In-Context: Disentangling Task Recognition and Task Learning. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [ArXiV](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09731)