Hierarchical Demonstration Order Optimization for Many-shot In-Context Learning

Yinhan He, Wendy Zheng, Song Wang, Zaiyi Zheng, Yushun Dong, Yaochen Zhu, Jundong Li

University of Virginia· University of Central Florida· Florida State University

in-context learning demonstration order optimization

Abstract

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a technique where large language models (LLMs) leverage multiple demonstrations (i.e., examples) to perform tasks. With the recent expansion of LLM context windows, many-shot ICL (generally with more than 50 demonstrations) can lead to significant performance improvements on a variety of language tasks such as text classification and question answering.

Nevertheless, ICL faces the issue of demonstration order instability (ICL-DOI), which means that performance varies significantly depending on the order of demonstrations. Moreover, ICL-DOI persists in many-shot ICL, validated by our thorough experimental investigation.

Current strategies for handling ICL-DOI are not applicable to many-shot ICL due to two critical challenges:

Most existing methods assess demonstration order quality by first prompting the LLM, then using heuristic metrics based on the LLM's predictions. In the many-shot scenarios, these metrics without theoretical grounding become unreliable, where the LLMs struggle to effectively utilize information from long input contexts, making order distinctions less clear.
The requirement to examine all orders for the large number of demonstrations is computationally infeasible due to the super-exponential complexity of the order space in many-shot ICL.

To tackle the first challenge, we design a demonstration order evaluation metric based on information theory for measuring order quality, which effectively quantifies the usable information gain of a given demonstration order. To address the second challenge, we propose a hierarchical demonstration order optimization method named HIDO that enables a more refined exploration of the order space, achieving high ICL performance without the need to evaluate all possible orders.

Extensive experiments on multiple LLMs and real-world datasets demonstrate that our HIDO method consistently and efficiently outperforms other baselines. Our code project can be found at https://github.com/YinhanHe123/HIDO/.