ACL 2024findings65 citations

Small Models are Valuable Plug-ins for Large Language Models

Canwen Xu, Yichong Xu, Shuohang Wang, Yang Liu, Chenguang Zhu, Julian McAuley

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 are powerful but their weights are often publicly unavailable and their immense sizes make the models difficult to be tuned with common hardware. As a result, effectively tuning these models with large-scale supervised data can be challenging. As an alternative, In-Context Learning (ICL) can only use a small number of supervised examples due to context length limits. In this paper, we propose Super In-Context Learning (SuperICL) which allows black-box LLMs to work with locally fine-tuned smaller models, resulting in superior performance on supervised tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that SuperICL can improve performance beyond state-of-the-art fine-tuned models while addressing the instability problem of in-context learning.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{xu-etal-2024-small,
    title = "Small Models are Valuable Plug-ins for Large Language Models",
    author = "Xu, Canwen  and
      Xu, Yichong  and
      Wang, Shuohang  and
      Liu, Yang  and
      Zhu, Chenguang  and
      McAuley, Julian",
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.18/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.18",
    pages = "283--294"
}
Small Models are Valuable Plug-ins for Large Language Models · ACL 2024