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.
Code (1)
Tasks
ClassificationGeneral ClassificationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Optimal Weighting for Exam Composition
A problem faced by many instructors is that of designing exams that accurately assess the abilities of the students. Typically these exams are prepared several days in advance, and generic question scores are used based …
Multiple-choicePrompt Optimization Is a Coin Flip: Diagnosing When It Helps in Compound AI Systems
Prompt optimization in compound AI systems is statistically indistinguishable from a coin flip: across 72 optimization runs on Claude Haiku 4.5 (6 methods $\times$ 4 tasks $\times$ 3 repeats), 49% score below zero-shot; …
Claim Check-Worthiness Detection: How Well do LLMs Grasp Annotation Guidelines?
The increasing threat of disinformation calls for automating parts of the fact-checking pipeline. Identifying text segments requiring fact-checking is known as claim detection (CD) and claim check-worthiness detection (C…
Fact CheckingToward Automated and Trustworthy Scientific Analysis and Visualization with LLM-Generated Code
As modern science becomes increasingly data-intensive, the ability to analyze and visualize large-scale, complex datasets is critical to accelerating discovery. However, many domain scientists lack the programming expert…
MACA: A Framework for Distilling Trustworthy LLMs into Efficient Retrievers
Modern enterprise retrieval systems must handle short, underspecified queries such as ``foreign transaction fee refund'' and ``recent check status''. In these cases, semantic nuance and metadata matter but per-query larg…