Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

Cutting Down on Prompts and Parameters: Simple Few-Shot Learning with Language Models

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2106.13353 v2 pith:3HFZUJJI submitted 2021-06-24 cs.CL cs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.LG
keywords finetuningpromptsfew-shotlearningparametersaccuracyachieveexamples
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

Signed reviews

No signed human review yet.

0 comments
read the original abstract

Prompting language models (LMs) with training examples and task descriptions has been seen as critical to recent successes in few-shot learning. In this work, we show that finetuning LMs in the few-shot setting can considerably reduce the need for prompt engineering. In fact, one can use null prompts, prompts that contain neither task-specific templates nor training examples, and achieve competitive accuracy to manually-tuned prompts across a wide range of tasks. While finetuning LMs does introduce new parameters for each downstream task, we show that this memory overhead can be substantially reduced: finetuning only the bias terms can achieve comparable or better accuracy than standard finetuning while only updating 0.1% of the parameters. All in all, we recommend finetuning LMs for few-shot learning as it is more accurate, robust to different prompts, and can be made nearly as efficient as using frozen LMs.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. SelfPrompt: Autonomously Evaluating LLM Robustness via Domain-Constrained Knowledge Guidelines and Refined Adversarial Prompts

    cs.CL 2024-12 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    SelfPrompt makes an LLM generate adversarial prompts from domain-specific knowledge graph triples and then use them to compute its own robustness score.

  2. QuaLLM-Health: An Adaptation of an LLM-Based Framework for Quantitative Data Extraction from Online Health Discussions

    cs.CL 2024-11 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    QuaLLM-Health claims GPT-4o-mini can extract clinical variables from GLP-1 Reddit discussions with macro F1 above 0.90, but the evaluation uses the same gold standard for prompt tuning and testing.

  3. Trusting CHATGPT: how minor tweaks in the prompts lead to major differences in sentiment classification

    cs.CL 2025-04 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    Minor prompt rewording produces statistically significant shifts in GPT-4o mini's Spanish sentiment labels, yet overall agreement between prompts stays between 92% and 98%.

  4. When IoT Meet LLMs: Applications and Challenges

    cs.DC 2024-11 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A survey of LLM-IoT integration plus an unvalidated conceptual system model for Tree of Thought based predictive maintenance in industrial IoT.

Pith tools