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How many data points is a prompt worth? (2021) (arxiv.org)
1 point by siraben on Apr 14, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Fine-tuning with a task-specific prompt was compared with using a plain classifier on top, keeping everything else equal across many tasks and data sizes. The prompt helped about as much as adding hundreds of extra training examples on average.

Abstract · How Many Data Points is a Prompt Worth?

When fine-tuning pretrained models for classification, researchers either use a generic model head or a task-specific prompt for prediction. Proponents of prompting have argued that prompts provide a method for injecting task-specific guidance, which is beneficial in low-data regimes. We aim to quantify this benefit through rigorous testing of prompts in a fair setting: comparing prompted and head-based fine-tuning in equal conditions across many tasks and data sizes. By controlling for many sources of advantage, we find that prompting does indeed provide a benefit, and that this benefit can be quantified per task. Results show that prompting is often worth 100s of data points on average across classification tasks.

Teven Le Scao, Alexander M. Rush
arXiv:2103.08493 · cs.LG · submitted Mar 15, 2021 · updated Apr 6, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · NAACL HLT 2021

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