Revisiting In-context Learning Inference Circuit in Large Language Models

In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the inference phenomena in large language models. Therefore, this paper proposes a comprehensive circuit to model the inference dynamics and try to explain the observed phenomena of ICL. In detail, we divide ICL inference into 3 major operations: (1) Summarize: LMs encode every input text (demonstrations and queries) into linear representation in the hidden states with sufficient information to solve ICL tasks. (2) Semantics Merge: LMs merge the encoded representations of demonstrations with their corresponding label tokens to produce joint representations of labels and demonstrations. (3) Feature Retrieval and Copy: LMs search the joint representations similar to the query representation on a task subspace, and copy the searched representations into the query. Then, language model heads capture these copied label representations to a certain extent and decode them into predicted labels. The proposed inference circuit successfully captured many phenomena observed during the ICL process, making it a comprehensive and practical explanation of the ICL inference process. Moreover, ablation analysis by disabling the proposed steps seriously damages the ICL performance, suggesting the proposed inference circuit is a dominating mechanism. Additionally, we confirm and list some bypass mechanisms that solve ICL tasks in parallel with the proposed circuit.

Token-based Decision Criteria Are Suboptimal in In-context Learning

In-Context Learning (ICL) typically utilizes classification criteria from probabilities of manually selected label tokens. However, we argue that such token-based classification criteria lead to suboptimal decision boundaries, despite delicate calibrations through translation and constrained rotation. To address this problem, we propose Hidden Calibration, which renounces token probabilities and uses the nearest centroid classifier on the LM's last hidden states. In detail, we use the nearest centroid classification on the hidden states, assigning the category of the nearest centroid previously observed from a few-shot calibration set to the test sample as the predicted label. Our experiments on 3 models and 10 classification datasets indicate that Hidden Calibration consistently outperforms current token-based calibrations by about 20%. Our further analysis demonstrates that Hidden Calibration finds better classification criteria with less inter-categories overlap, and LMs provide linearly separable intra-category clusters with the help of demonstrations, which supports Hidden Calibration and gives new insights into the conventional ICL.

Understanding Token Probability Encoding in Output Embeddings

In this paper, we investigate the output token probability information in the output embedding of language models. We provide an approximate common log-linear encoding of output token probabilities within the output embedding vectors and demonstrate that it is accurate and sparse when the output space is large and output logits are concentrated. Based on such findings, we edit the encoding in output embedding to modify the output probability distribution accurately. Moreover, the sparsity we find in output probability encoding suggests that a large number of dimensions in the output embedding do not contribute to causal language modeling. Therefore, we attempt to delete the output-unrelated dimensions and find more than 30% of the dimensions can be deleted without significant movement in output distribution and degeneration on sequence generation. Additionally, in training dynamics, we use such encoding as a probe and find that the output embeddings capture token frequency information in early steps, even before an obvious convergence starts.