Pre-Training to Learn in Context
Yuxian Gu, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Minlie Huang · 2023
In-context learning, where pre-trained language models learn to perform tasks from task examples and instructions in their contexts, has attracted much attention in the NLP community.However, the ability of in-context learning is not fully exploited because language models are not explicitly trained to learn in context.To this end, we propose PICL (Pretraining for In-Context Learning), a framework to enhance the language models' in-context learning ability by pre-training the model on a large collection of "intrinsic tasks" in the general plain-text corpus using the simple language modeling objective.PICL encourages the model to infer and perform tasks by conditioning on the contexts while maintaining task generalization of pre-trained models.We evaluate the in-context learning performance of the model trained with PICL on seven widelyused text classification datasets and the SUPER-NATURALINSTRCTIONS benchmark, which contains 100+ NLP tasks formulated to text generation.Our experiments show that PICL is more effective and task-generalizable than a range of baselines, outperforming larger language models with nearly 4x parameters.The code is publicly available at https://github. com/thu-coai/PICL.