A Survey on LLM Inference-Time Self-Improvement

Techniques that enhance inference through increased computation at test-time have recently gained attention. In this survey, we investigate the current state of LLM Inference-Time Self-Improvement from three different perspectives: Independent Self-improvement, focusing on enhancements via decoding or sampling methods; Context-Aware Self-Improvement, leveraging additional context or datastore; and Model-Aided Self-Improvement, achieving improvement through model collaboration. We provide a comprehensive review of recent relevant studies, contribute an in-depth taxonomy, and discuss challenges and limitations, offering insights for future research.

Co$^2$PT: Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Language Models through Counterfactual Contrastive Prompt Tuning

Pre-trained Language Models are widely used in many important real-world applications. However, recent studies show that these models can encode social biases from large pre-training corpora and even amplify biases in downstream applications. To address this challenge, we propose Co$^2$PT, an efficient and effective debias-while-prompt tuning method for mitigating biases via counterfactual contrastive prompt tuning on downstream tasks. Our experiments conducted on three extrinsic bias benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of Co$^2$PT on bias mitigation during the prompt tuning process and its adaptability to existing upstream debiased language models. These findings indicate the strength of Co$^2$PT and provide promising avenues for further enhancement in bias mitigation on downstream tasks.