In-Context Learning with Iterative Demonstration Selection

Spurred by advancements in scale, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong few-shot learning ability via in-context learning (ICL). However, the performance of ICL has been shown to be highly sensitive to the selection of few-shot demonstrations. Selecting the most suitable examples as context remains an ongoing challenge and an open problem. Existing literature has highlighted the importance of selecting examples that are diverse or semantically similar to the test sample while ignoring the fact that the optimal selection dimension, i.e., diversity or similarity, is task-specific. Leveraging the merits of both dimensions, we propose Iterative Demonstration Selection (IDS). Using zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning (Zero-shot-CoT), IDS iteratively selects examples that are diverse but still strongly correlated with the test sample as ICL demonstrations. Specifically, IDS applies Zero-shot-CoT to the test sample before demonstration selection. The output reasoning path is then used to choose demonstrations that are prepended to the test sample for inference. The generated answer is accompanied by its corresponding reasoning path for extracting a new set of demonstrations in the next iteration. After several iterations, IDS adopts majority voting to obtain the final result. Through extensive experiments on tasks including commonsense reasoning, question answering, topic classification, and sentiment analysis, we demonstrate that IDS can consistently outperform existing ICL demonstration selection methods.