How to quickly select good in-context examples in large language models for data-to-text tasks?

Abstract In the realm of data-to-text generation tasks, the use of large language models (LLMs) has become common practice, yielding fluent and coherent outputs. Existing literature highlights that the quality of in-context examples significantly influences the empirical performance of these models, making the efficient selection of high-quality examples crucial. We hypothesize that the quality of these examples is primarily determined by two properties: their similarity to the input data and their diversity from one another. Based on this insight, we introduce a novel approach, Double Clustering-based In-Context Example Selection, specifically designed for data-to-text generation tasks. Our method involves two distinct clustering stages. The first stage aims to maximize the similarity between the in-context examples and the input data. The second stage ensures diversity among the selected in-context examples. Additionally, we have developed a batched generation method to enhance the token usage efficiency of LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to traditional methods of selecting in-context learning samples, our approach significantly improves both time efficiency and token utilization while maintaining accuracy.