2025.naacl-long.96@ACL

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#1 DAWN-ICL: Strategic Planning of Problem-solving Trajectories for Zero-Shot In-Context Learning [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Xinyu Tang, Xiaolei Wang, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen

Zero-shot in-context learning (ZS-ICL) aims to conduct in-context learning (ICL) without using human-annotated demonstrations.Existing ZS-ICL methods either use large language models (LLMs) to generate (input, label) pairs as pseudo-demonstrations or leverage historical pseudo-demonstrations to help solve the current problem.They assume that all problems are from the same task and traverse them in a random order.However, in real-world scenarios, problems usually come from diverse tasks, and only a few belong to the same task.The random traversing order may generate unreliable pseudo-demonstrations and lead to error accumulation.To address this problem, we reformulate ZS-**ICL** as a planning problem and propose a **D**emonstration-**AW**are Mo**N**te Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) approach (DAWN-ICL), which leverages MCTS to strategically plan the problem-solving trajectories for ZS-ICL.In addition, to achieve effective and efficient Q value estimation, we propose a demonstration-aware Q-value function and use it to enhance the selection phase and accelerate the expansion and simulation phases in MCTS.Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DAWN-ICL on in-domain and cross-domain scenarios, and it even outperforms ICL using human-annotated demonstrations.The code is available at https://github.com/txy77/MCTS4ZSICL.

Subject: NAACL.2025 - Long Papers