In-context learning (ICL) enables Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to adapt to new tasks without parameter updates, using a few demonstrations from a large support set. However, selecting informative demonstrations leads to high computational and memory costs. While some methods explore selecting a small and representative coreset in the text classification, evaluating all support set samples remains costly, and discarded samples lead to unnecessary information loss. These methods may also be less effective for image classification due to differences in feature spaces. Given these limitations, we propose Key-based Coreset Optimization (KeCO), a novel framework that leverages untapped data to construct a compact and informative coreset. We introduce visual features as keys within the coreset, which serve as the anchor for identifying samples to be updated through different selection strategies. By leveraging untapped samples from the support set, we update the keys of selected coreset samples, enabling the randomly initialized coreset to evolve into a more informative coreset under low computational cost. Through extensive experiments on coarse-grained and fine-grained image classification benchmarks, we demonstrate that KeCO effectively enhances ICL performance for image classification task, achieving an average improvement of more than 20%. Notably, we evaluate KeCO under a simulated online scenario, and the strong performance in this scenario highlights the practical value of our framework for resource-constrained real-world scenarios.

Inspired by the success of Large Language Models in dealing with new tasks via In-Context Learning (ICL) in NLP, researchers have also developed Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with ICL capabilities. However, when implementing ICL using these LVLMs, researchers usually resort to the simplest way like random sampling to configure the in-context sequence, thus leading to sub-optimal results. To enhance the ICL performance, in this study, we use Visual Question Answering (VQA) as case study to explore diverse in-context configurations to find the powerful ones. Additionally, through observing the changes of the LVLM outputs by altering the in-context sequence, we gain insights into the inner properties of LVLMs, improving our understanding of them. Specifically, to explore in-context configurations, we design diverse retrieval methods and employ different strategies to manipulate the retrieved demonstrations. Through exhaustive experiments on three VQA datasets: VQAv2, VizWiz, and OK-VQA, we uncover three important inner properties of the applied LVLM and demonstrate which strategies can consistently improve the ICL VQA performance. Our code is provided in: https://github.com/GaryJiajia/OFv2_ICL_VQA.

As language models continue to scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited emerging capabilities in In-Context Learning (ICL), enabling them to solve language tasks by prefixing a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) as context. Inspired by these advancements, researchers have extended these techniques to develop Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with ICL capabilities. However, applying ICL usually faces two major challenges: 1) using more ICDs will largely increase the inference time and 2) the performance is sensitive to the selection of ICDs. These challenges are further exacerbated in LMMs due to the integration of multiple data types and the combinational complexity of multimodal ICDs. Recently, to address these challenges, some NLP studies introduce non-learnable In-Context Vectors (ICVs) which extract useful task information from ICDs into a single vector and then insert it into the LLM to help solve the corresponding task. However, although useful in simple NLP tasks, these non-learnable methods fail to handle complex multimodal tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA). In this study, we propose \underline{\textbf{L}}earnable \underline{\textbf{I}}n-Context \underline{\textbf{Ve}}ctor (LIVE) to distill essential task information from demonstrations, improving ICL performance in LMMs. Experiments show that LIVE can significantly reduce computational costs while enhancing accuracy in VQA tasks compared to traditional ICL and other non-learnable ICV methods.

Xu Yang, Jiawei Peng, Zihua Wang, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Zhangzikang Li, Yu Zhang. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.