1. OptiSeq: Optimizing Example Ordering for In-Context Learning
- Author
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Bhope, Rahul Atul, Venkateswaran, Praveen, Jayaram, K. R., Isahagian, Vatche, Muthusamy, Vinod, and Venkatasubramanian, Nalini
- Subjects
Computer Science - Machine Learning ,Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence ,Computer Science - Computation and Language ,Computer Science - Performance - Abstract
Developers using LLMs in their applications and agents have provided plenty of anecdotal evidence that in-context-learning (ICL) is fragile. In addition to the quantity and quality of examples, we show that the order in which the in-context examples are listed in the prompt affects the output of the LLM and, consequently, their performance. In this paper, we present OptiSeq, which introduces a score based on log probabilities of LLM outputs to prune the universe of possible example orderings in few-shot ICL and recommend the best order(s) by distinguishing between correct and incorrect outputs resulting from different order permutations. Through a detailed empirical evaluation on multiple LLMs, datasets and prompts, we demonstrate that OptiSeq improves accuracy by 6 - 10.5 percentage points across multiple tasks.
- Published
- 2025