@inproceedings{an-etal-2023-context,
    title = "How Do In-Context Examples Affect Compositional Generalization?",
    author = "An, Shengnan  and
      Lin, Zeqi  and
      Fu, Qiang  and
      Chen, Bei  and
      Zheng, Nanning  and
      Lou, Jian-Guang  and
      Zhang, Dongmei",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.618",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.618",
    pages = "11027--11052",
    abstract = "Compositional generalization{--}understanding unseen combinations of seen primitives{--}is an essential reasoning capability in human intelligence. The AI community mainly studies this capability by fine-tuning neural networks on lots of training samples, while it is still unclear whether and how in-context learning{--}the prevailing few-shot paradigm based on large language models{--}exhibits compositional generalization. In this paper, we present CoFe, a test suite to investigate in-context compositional generalization. We find that the compositional generalization performance can be easily affected by the selection of in-context examples, thus raising the research question what the key factors are to make good in-context examples for compositional generalization. We study three potential factors: similarity, diversity and complexity. Our systematic experiments indicate that in-context examples should be structurally similar to the test case, diverse from each other, and individually simple. Furthermore, two strong limitations are observed: in-context compositional generalization on fictional words is much weaker than that on commonly used ones; it is still critical that the in-context examples should cover required linguistic structures, even though the backbone model has been pre-trained on large corpus. We hope our analysis would facilitate the understanding and utilization of in-context learning paradigm.",
}

Compositional generalization{--}understanding unseen combinations of seen primitives{--}is an essential reasoning capability in human intelligence. The AI community mainly studies this capability by fine-tuning neural networks on lots of training samples, while it is still unclear whether and how in-context learning{--}the prevailing few-shot paradigm based on large language models{--}exhibits compositional generalization. In this paper, we present CoFe, a test suite to investigate in-context compositional generalization. We find that the compositional generalization performance can be easily affected by the selection of in-context examples, thus raising the research question what the key factors are to make good in-context examples for compositional generalization. We study three potential factors: similarity, diversity and complexity. Our systematic experiments indicate that in-context examples should be structurally similar to the test case, diverse from each other, and individually simple. Furthermore, two strong limitations are observed: in-context compositional generalization on fictional words is much weaker than that on commonly used ones; it is still critical that the in-context examples should cover required linguistic structures, even though the backbone model has been pre-trained on large corpus. We hope our analysis would facilitate the understanding and utilization of in-context learning paradigm.
An, Shengnan Lin, Zeqi Fu, Qiang Chen, Bei Zheng, Nanning Lou, Jian-Guang Zhang, Dongmei
How Do In-Context Examples Affect Compositional Generalization?