StablePT : Towards Stable Prompting for Few-shot Learning via Input Separation

Xiaoming Liu, Chen Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Chengzhengxu Li, Longtian Wang, Yu Lan, Chao Shen


Abstract
Large language models have shown their ability to become effective few-shot learners with prompting, revoluting the paradigm of learning with data scarcity. However, this approach largely depends on the quality of prompt initialization and always exhibits large variability among different runs. Such property makes prompt tuning highly unreliable and vulnerable to poorly constructed prompts, which limits its extension to more real-world applications. To tackle this issue, we propose to treat the hard prompt and soft prompt as separate inputs to mitigate noise brought by the prompt initialization. Furthermore, we optimize soft prompts with contrastive learning for utilizing class-aware information in the training process to maintain model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that StablePT outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.97% in accuracy and reduces the standard deviation by 1.92 on average. Furthermore, extensive experiments underscore its robustness and stability across 8 datasets covering various tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.542
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9259–9273
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.542
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoming Liu, Chen Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Chengzhengxu Li, Longtian Wang, Yu Lan, and Chao Shen. 2024. StablePT : Towards Stable Prompting for Few-shot Learning via Input Separation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 9259–9273, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
StablePT : Towards Stable Prompting for Few-shot Learning via Input Separation (Liu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.542.pdf
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