Small Models are Valuable Plug-ins for Large Language Models
Authors: name: Canwen Xu; name: Yichong Xu; name: Shuohang Wang; name: Yang Liu; name: Chenguang Zhu; name: Julian McAuley
Published: 2023-05-15 17:59:01

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. Furthermore, SuperICL can enhance
the capabilities of smaller models, such as multilinguality and
interpretability.