True Few-Shot Learning with Prompts—A Real-World Perspective

Schick, Timo and Schütze, Hinrich (2022): True Few-Shot Learning with Prompts—A Real-World Perspective. In: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 10: pp. 716-731

Abstract

Prompt-based approaches excel at few-shot learning. However, Perez et al. (2021) recently cast doubt on their performance as they had difficulty getting good results in a “true” few-shot setting in which prompts and hyperparameters cannot be tuned on a dev set. In view of this, we conduct an extensive study of Pet, a method that combines textual instructions with example-based finetuning. We show that, if correctly configured, Pet performs strongly in true few-shot settings without a dev set. Crucial for this strong performance is a number of design choices, including Pet’s ability to intelligently handle multiple prompts. We put our findings to a real-world test by running Pet on RAFT, a benchmark of tasks taken from realistic NLP applications for which no labeled dev or test sets are available. Pet achieves a new state of the art on RAFT and performs close to non-expert humans for 7 out of 11 tasks. These results demonstrate that prompt-based learners can successfully be applied in true few-shot settings and underpin our belief that learning from instructions will play an important role on the path towards human-like few-shot learning capabilities.

• Item Type: Journal article
• EU Funded Grant Agreement Number: 740516
• EU Projects: Horizon 2020 > ERC Grants > ERC Advanced Grant > ERC Grant 740516: NonSequeToR - Non-sequence models for tokenization replacement
• Form of publication: Publisher's Version
• Research Centers: Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS)
• Subjects: 400 Language > 400 Language; 400 Language > 410 Linguistics
• Language: English