{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/nice-to-optimize-in-context-examples-or-not","title":"NICE: To Optimize In-Context Examples or Not?","arxiv_id":"2402.06733","date":"2024-02-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Pragya Srivastava","Satvik Golechha","Amit Deshpande","Amit Sharma"],"abstract":"Recent work shows that in-context learning and optimization of in-context examples (ICE) can significantly improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks, leading to an apparent consensus that ICE optimization is crucial for better performance. However, most of these studies assume a fixed or no instruction provided in the prompt. We challenge this consensus by investigating the necessity of optimizing ICE when task-specific instructions are provided and find that there are many tasks for which it yields diminishing returns. In particular, using a diverse set of tasks and a systematically created instruction set with gradually added details, we find that as the prompt instruction becomes more detailed, the returns on ICE optimization diminish. To characterize this behavior, we introduce a task-specific metric called Normalized Invariability to Choice of Examples (NICE) that quantifies the learnability of tasks from a given instruction, and provides a heuristic to help decide whether to optimize instructions or ICE for a new task. Given a task, the proposed metric can reliably predict the utility of optimizing ICE compared to using random ICE. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/nice-icl.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06733v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.06733v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"nice-to-optimize-in-context-examples-or-not","repo_url":"https://github.com/microsoft/nice-icl","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"in-context-learning","task_name":"In-Context Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2402.06733","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}