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  4. Mitigating Label Biases for In-context Learning
 
conference paper

Mitigating Label Biases for In-context Learning

Fei, Yu
•
Hou, Yifan
•
Chen, Zeming  
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Rogers, A
•
Boyd-Graber, J
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January 1, 2023
Proceedings Of The 61St Annual Meeting Of The Association For Computational Linguistics (Acl 2023): Long Papers, Vol 1
61st Annual Meeting of the the Association-for-Computational-Linguistics (ACL)

Various design settings for in-context learning (ICL), such as the choice and order of the in-context examples, can bias the model's predictions. While many studies discuss these design choices, there have been few systematic investigations into categorizing them and mitigating their impact. In this work, we define a typology for three types of label biases in ICL for text classification: vanilla-label bias, contextlabel bias, and domain-label bias (which we conceptualize and detect for the first time). Our analysis demonstrates that prior label bias calibration methods fall short of addressing all three types of biases. Specifically, domain-label bias restricts LLMs to random-level performance on many tasks regardless of the choice of in-context examples. To mitigate the effect of these biases, we propose a simple bias calibration method that estimates a language model's label bias using random indomain words from the task corpus. After controlling for this estimated bias when making predictions, our novel domain-context calibration significantly improves the ICL performance of GPT-J and GPT-3 on a wide range of tasks. The gain is substantial on tasks with large domain-label bias (up to 37% in Macro-F1). Furthermore, our results generalize to models with different scales, pretraining methods, and manually-designed task instructions, showing the prevalence of label biases in ICL.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.783
Web of Science ID

WOS:001190962505045

Author(s)
Fei, Yu
Hou, Yifan
Chen, Zeming  
Bosselut, Antoine  
Editors
Rogers, A
•
Boyd-Graber, J
•
Okazaki, N
Date Issued

2023-01-01

Publisher

Assoc Computational Linguistics-Acl

Publisher place

Stroudsburg

Published in
Proceedings Of The 61St Annual Meeting Of The Association For Computational Linguistics (Acl 2023): Long Papers, Vol 1
ISBN of the book

978-1-959429-72-2

Start page

14014

End page

14031

Subjects

Technology

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
NLP  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
61st Annual Meeting of the the Association-for-Computational-Linguistics (ACL)

Toronto, CANADA

JUL 09-14, 2023

Available on Infoscience
May 1, 2024
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/207632
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