Which Examples to Annotate for In-Context Learning? Towards Effective
  and Efficient Selection
Costas Mavromatis Balasubramaniam Srinivasan Zhengyuan Shen Jiani Zhang Huzefa Rangwala Christos Faloutsos George Karypis
Large Language Models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks via in-context learning
(ICL). ICL is efficient as it does not require any parameter updates to the
trained LLM, but only few annotated examples as input for the LLM. In this
work, we investigate an active learning approach for ICL, where there is a
limited budget for annotating examples. We propose a model-adaptive
optimization-free algorithm, termed AdaICL, which identifies examples that the
model is uncertain about, and performs semantic diversity-based example
selection. Diversity-based sampling improves overall effectiveness, while
uncertainty sampling improves budget efficiency and helps the LLM learn new
information. Moreover, AdaICL poses its sampling strategy as a Maximum Coverage
problem, that dynamically adapts based on the model's feedback and can be
approximately solved via greedy algorithms. Extensive experiments on nine
datasets and seven LLMs show that AdaICL improves performance by 4.4% accuracy
points over SOTA (7.7% relative improvement), is up to 3x more budget-efficient
than performing annotations uniformly at random, while it outperforms SOTA with
2x fewer ICL examples.