In-context learning (ICL) has consistently demonstrated superior performance over zero-shot performance in large language models (LLMs). However, the understanding of the dynamics of ICL and the aspects that influence downstream performance remains limited, especially for natural language generation (NLG) tasks. This work aims to address this gap by investigating the ICL capabilities of LLMs and studying the impact of different aspects of the in-context demonstrations for the task of machine translation (MT). Our preliminary investigations aim to discern whether in-context learning (ICL) is predominantly influenced by demonstrations or instructions by applying diverse perturbations to in-context demonstrations while preserving the task instruction. We observe varying behavior to perturbed examples across different model families, notably with BLOOM-7B derivatives being severely influenced by noise, whereas Llama 2 derivatives not only exhibit robustness but also tend to show enhancements over the clean baseline when subject to perturbed demonstrations. This suggests that the robustness of ICL may be governed by several factors, including the type of noise, perturbation direction (source or target), the extent of pretraining of the specific model, and fine-tuning for downstream tasks if applicable. Further investigation is warranted to develop a comprehensive understanding of these factors in future research.

探讨了大型语言模型在上下文学习中的能力，并研究了上下文演示的不同方面对机器翻译任务的影响。观察到不同模型家族对扰动示例呈现不同的行为，表明上下文学习的鲁棒性可能受到多种因素的影响。需要进一步研究来全面了解这些因素。

MT中LLM的上下文学习能力的实证分析