Cited by 387Topic ModelingDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningNatural Language Processing Techniques

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 56 of the 56 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 3 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learning

Open access
Rubin, Ohad, Herzig, Jonathan, Berant, Jonathan·2022·Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Abstract

In-context learning is a recent paradigm in natural language understanding, where a large pretrained language model (LM) observes a test instance and a few training examples as its input, and directly decodes the output without any update to its parameters.However, performance has been shown to strongly depend on the selected training examples (termed prompts).In this work, we propose an efficient method for retrieving prompts for in-context learning using annotated data and an LM.Given an inputoutput pair, we estimate the probability of the output given the input and a candidate training example as the prompt, and label training examples as positive or negative based on this probability.We then train an efficient dense retriever from this data, which is used to retrieve training examples as prompts at test time.We evaluate our approach on three sequence-tosequence tasks where language utterances are mapped to meaning representations, and find that it substantially outperforms prior work and multiple baselines across the board.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

The paper proposes Efficient Prompt Retrieval (EPR), which uses a language model to label which training examples are good in-context prompts and trains a dense retriever from that signal. EPR substantially outperforms prior prompt-retrieval baselines on BREAK, MTOP, and SMCALFLOW.

Key findings

  • With GPT-NEO as both scoring and inference LM, EPR improves over the best baseline from 26.0 to 31.9 on BREAK, from 57.0 to 64.2 on MTOP, and from 51.4 to 54.3 on SMCALFLOW.
  • In the one-shot BREAK setting, EPR reaches 23.0 LF-EM, outperforming the best baseline by 8.5 points and BM25-ORACLE by 5 points.
  • When GPT-NEO is used as a proxy scoring LM for larger inference LMs, EPR outperforms BM25 and CBR by 2–8 points across all datasets and pretrained models.
  • Prompt-copying analysis shows high abstract copying in MTOP and SMCALFLOW (>80%); on MTOP, 84.5% of examples were abstractly copied, and EPR achieved 71.6% EM on that copied subset versus 64.2% overall.

Methods

  • EPR generates training data by retrieving candidate prompts with an unsupervised retriever (BM25 or SBERT; BM25 chosen), scoring each candidate with a scoring LM as Prob(y | candidate, x), and labeling top-k as positive and bottom-k as negative (k=5, L=50).
  • It trains a dense retriever with DPR-style contrastive learning using BERT-base input and prompt encoders, then uses FAISS maximum inner-product search at inference to retrieve prompts within the inference LM’s context limit.
  • Evaluation covers three structured sequence-to-sequence tasks—BREAK, MTOP, and SMCALFLOW—using GPT-NEO as scoring LM and GPT-NEO, GPT-J, GPT-3, or CODEX as inference LMs, with LF-EM/NEM/EM metrics and a 2,048-token context size.

Limitations

  • Paper-stated: the authors note that large language models exhibit bias, and since EPR is trained on signal from such LMs, it might also exhibit these biases.
  • Paper-stated: the method scores each training example independently at training time, while at test time the LM observes a sequence of examples; modeling dependence between examples is left to future work.
  • Evident from the text: evaluation is limited to three English structured tasks mapping utterances to meaning representations, and the approach relies on a scoring LM as a proxy for the inference LM.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.191

Cites

56 of 56 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

19 Own result · 11 Own interpretation · 6 No basis given · 3 Not checked yet

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  • It may state two separate claims as one. 10
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 5
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 1
15 of 15
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The candidate set Ē includes good prompt candidates and hard negatives.

    “This should lead to relevant positive examples, assuming that the set of candidates, Ē includes good prompt candidates and hard negatives, since all candidates have high similarity with (x, y) according to R u (y, D).”
1 of 1

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Citations

Cites

Show all 54 references

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. Geoffrey E. Hinton and Sam T. Roweis. 2002. Stochas- tic neighbor embedding. In NIPS.
  2. Urvashi Khandelwal, Angela Fan, Dan Jurafsky, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Mike Lewis. 2021. Nearest Neigh- bor Machine Translation. In Proceedings of ICLR.

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Metadata

Authors
Rubin, O., Herzig, J., & Berant, J.
Affiliations
Tel Aviv University (IL)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Published
2022
Pages
2655-2671
OpenAlex
W4287891464
Cited by
374
References
54
Citations by year
2026: 57 · 2025: 97 · 2024: 91 · 2023: 119 · 2022: 10
FWCI
43.96
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
European Commission
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
in-context learning, dense retrievers, training data selection, pre-trained language models, annotated dataset, meaning representation

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A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-06, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).

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