GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-Shot Learning

Hanwei Xu, Yujun Chen, Yulun Du, Nan Shao, Wang Yanggang, Haiyu Li, Zhilin Yang


Abstract
Prompt-based techniques have demostrated great potential for improving the few-shot generalization of pretrained language models. However, their performance heavily relies on the manual design of prompts and thus requiring a lot of human efforts. In this paper, we introduce Genetic Prompt Search (GPS) to improve few-shot learning with prompts, which utilizes a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt.GPS is gradient-free and requires no update of model parameters but only a small validation set. Experiments on diverse datasets proved the effectiveness of GPS, which outperforms manual prompts by a large margin of 2.6 points. Our method is also better than other parameter-efficient tuning methods such as prompt tuning.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.559
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8162–8171
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.559
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.559
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hanwei Xu, Yujun Chen, Yulun Du, Nan Shao, Wang Yanggang, Haiyu Li, and Zhilin Yang. 2022. GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-Shot Learning. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8162–8171, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-Shot Learning (Xu et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.559.pdf