Verb-ICL: Rethinking In-Context Learning for Structured Prediction

arXiv:2610.04725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured prediction tasks pose unique challenges for in-context learning (ICL): their compositional outputs require modeling fine-grained, token-level patterns that sentence-level approaches fail to capture, and their task-specific annotation conventions are human-defined artifacts that cannot be acquired through pretraining alone. We propose Verb-ICL, a selective annotation framework for ICL-based structured prediction that addresses both challenges. Verb-ICL first selects representative examples using a token-level coverage strategy that captures local semantic patterns critical for structured prediction, then generates actionable error feedback that codifies task-specific annotation guidelines and incorporates this feedback into ICL demonstrations. We evaluate Verb-ICL on six structured prediction datasets spanning information extraction and semantic parsing. Experiments with recent LLMs show that Verb-ICL consistently outperforms strong selective annotation baselines under low-resource settings and continues to provide gains as the annotation budget increases. Extended analyses demonstrate that the generated feedback is predominantly useful across a four-category quality taxonomy, generalizes as task-level guidance beyond instance-specific corrections, and improves performance regardless of the underlying selection strategy.

Abstract:Structured prediction tasks pose unique challenges for in-context learning (ICL): their compositional outputs require modeling fine-grained, token-level patterns that sentence-level approaches fail to capture, and their task-specific annotation conventions are human-defined artifacts that cannot be acquired through pretraining alone. We propose Verb-ICL, a selective annotation framework for ICL-based structured prediction that addresses both challenges. Verb-ICL first selects representative examples using a token-level coverage strategy that captures local semantic patterns critical for structured prediction, then generates actionable error feedback that codifies task-specific annotation guidelines and incorporates this feedback into ICL demonstrations. We evaluate Verb-ICL on six structured prediction datasets spanning information extraction and semantic parsing. Experiments with recent LLMs show that Verb-ICL consistently outperforms strong selective annotation baselines under low-resource settings and continues to provide gains as the annotation budget increases. Extended analyses demonstrate that the generated feedback is predominantly useful across a four-category quality taxonomy, generalizes as task-level guidance beyond instance-specific corrections, and improves performance regardless of the underlying selection strategy.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.04725 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.04725v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.04725 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Verb-ICL: Rethinking In-Context Learning for Structured Prediction

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