@inproceedings{gao-etal-2021-making,
title = "Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners",
author = "Gao, Tianyu and
Fisch, Adam and
Chen, Danqi",
editor = "Zong, Chengqing and
Xia, Fei and
Li, Wenjie and
Navigli, Roberto",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = aug,
year = "2021",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.295",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.295",
pages = "3816--3830",
abstract = "The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF{---}better few-shot fine-tuning of language models{---}a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30{\%} absolute improvement, and 11{\%} on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.",
}
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<abstract>The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF—better few-shot fine-tuning of language models—a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners
%A Gao, Tianyu
%A Fisch, Adam
%A Chen, Danqi
%Y Zong, Chengqing
%Y Xia, Fei
%Y Li, Wenjie
%Y Navigli, Roberto
%S Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2021
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online
%F gao-etal-2021-making
%X The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF—better few-shot fine-tuning of language models—a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.
%R 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.295
%U https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.295
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.295
%P 3816-3830
Markdown (Informal)
[Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.295) (Gao et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
ACL
- Tianyu Gao, Adam Fisch, and Danqi Chen. 2021. Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3816–3830, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.