Reward Mixology: Crafting Hybrid Signals for Reinforcement Learning Driven In-Context Learning

AbstractIn-context learning (ICL) performance heavily relies on the quality and ordering of demonstrations. Iterative selection (IS) is a promising approach to address this issue, but existing IS methods face two key challenges: the oversimplification of process reward signals that guide intermediate steps (often using single-dimensional metrics) and the lack of outcome reward signals that directly optimize final-task accuracy (relying solely on binary terminal feedback like correct/incorrect predictions). To address these issues, we propose a reinforcement learning method R-Mix which models iterative demonstration selection as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), crafting hybrid reward signals — combining outcome-based accuracy signals (i.e., outcome rewards) with process-oriented signals (i.e, process rewards) like stepwise influence and label entropy improvement. Our analysis reveals a positive but trade-off relationship between outcome rewards and process rewards, underscoring the importance of both components for effective policy optimization. We further introduce a dual-head policy architecture that explicitly decouples input-semantic relevance and label-content compatibility. Experiments across NLP benchmarks demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, with ablation studies validating the necessity of both reward components and architectural disentanglement. Our work has deeply explored the effective potential of ICL through demonstration selection.