Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable few-shot performance, but the performance can be sensitive to the selection of few-shot instances. We propose PATRON, a new method that uses prompt-based uncertainty estimation for data selection for pre-trained language model fine-tuning under cold-start scenarios, i.e., no initial labeled data are available. In PATRON, we design (1) a prompt-based uncertainty propagation approach to estimate the importance of data points and (2) a partition-then-rewrite (PTR) strategy to promote sample diversity when querying for annotations. Experiments on six text classification datasets show that PATRON outperforms the strongest cold-start data selection baselines by up to 6.9%. Besides, with 128 labels only, PATRON achieves 91.0% and 92.1% of the fully supervised performance based on vanilla fine-tuning and prompt-based learning respectively. Our implementation of PATRON is available at \url{https://github.com/yueyu1030/Patron}.
@article{arxiv.2209.06995,
title = {Cold-Start Data Selection for Few-shot Language Model Fine-tuning: A Prompt-Based Uncertainty Propagation Approach},
author = {Yue Yu and Rongzhi Zhang and Ran Xu and Jieyu Zhang and Jiaming Shen and Chao Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.06995},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
ACL 2023 Main Conference. Code: https://github.com/yueyu1030/Patron