# Supervised Knowledge Makes Large Language Models Better In-context Learners

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15918 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15918/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [An Explanation of In-context Learning as Implicit Bayesian Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02080/) (2021)
- [Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00114/) (2021)
- [Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08633/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15097/) (2022)
- [Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07899/) (2021)
- [Augmented Language Models: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07842/) (2023)
- [True Few-Shot Learning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11447/) (2021)
- [HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11747/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11495/) (2023)
- [PandaLM: An Automatic Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Instruction Tuning Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05087/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Large Multimodal Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15116/) (2024)
- [Agents in Software Engineering: Survey, Landscape, and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09030/) (2024)
- [KIEval: A Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15043/) (2024)
- [RewardAnything: Generalizable Principle-Following Reward Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03637/) (2025)
- [Reasoning Through Execution: Unifying Process and Outcome Rewards for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15118/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Analysis of Uncertainty in Large Language Model Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10709/) (2025)
- [SymbolicAI: A framework for logic-based approaches combining generative models and solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00854/) (2024)
- [When Punctuation Matters: A Large-Scale Comparison of Prompt Robustness Methods for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11383/) (2025)
- [FreeEval: A Modular Framework for Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06003/) (2024)
- [SAEMark: Steering Personalized Multilingual LLM Watermarks with Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08211/) (2025)
- [Enhancing In-Context Learning via Implicit Demonstration Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00100/) (2024)
- [Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12906/) (2026)
- [A Rationale-centric Counterfactual Data Augmentation Method for Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01921/) (2024)
- [Prompt Candidates, then Distill: A Teacher-Student Framework for LLM-driven Data Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03857/) (2025)
- [Improving In-Context Learning with Small Language Model Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21868/) (2024)
- [LUK: Empowering Log Understanding with Expert Knowledge from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01909/) (2024)
- [Cross-Document Cross-Lingual NLI via RST-Enhanced Graph Fusion and Interpretability Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12324/) (2025)
- [E-ICL: Enhancing Fine-Grained Emotion Recognition through the Lens of Prototype Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02642/) (2024)
- [From Parameters to Prompts: Understanding and Mitigating the Factuality Gap between Fine-Tuned LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23410/) (2025)
- [Beyond Surface Imitation: Contrastive Modeling for Reasoning Path Alignment in Multimodal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10177/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit emerging in-context learning abilities through prompt engineering. The recent progress in large-scale generative models has further expanded their use in real-world language applications. However, the critical challenge of improving the generalizability and factuality of LLMs in natural language understanding and question answering remains under-explored. While previous in-context learning research has focused on enhancing models to adhere to users' specific instructions and quality expectations, and to avoid undesired outputs, little to no work has explored the use of task-Specific fine-tuned Language Models (SLMs) to improve LLMs' in-context learning during the inference stage. Our primary contribution is the establishment of a simple yet effective framework that enhances the reliability of LLMs as it: 1) generalizes out-of-distribution data, 2) elucidates how LLMs benefit from discriminative models, and 3) minimizes hallucinations in generative tasks. Using our proposed plug-in method, enhanced versions of Llama 2 and ChatGPT surpass their original versions regarding generalizability and factuality. We offer a comprehensive suite of resources, including 16 curated datasets, prompts, model checkpoints, and LLM outputs across 9 distinct tasks. The code and data are released at: https://github.com/YangLinyi/Supervised-Knowledge-Makes-Large-Language-Models-Better-In-context-Learners. Our empirical analysis sheds light on the advantages of incorporating discriminative models into LLMs and highlights the potential of our methodology in fostering more reliable LLMs.