English

Zero-Label Prompt Selection

Computation and Language 2022-11-10 v1

Abstract

Natural language prompts have been shown to facilitate cross-task generalization for large language models. However, with no or limited labeled examples, the cross-task performance is highly sensitive to the choice of prompts, while selecting a high-performing prompt is challenging given the scarcity of labels. To address the issue, we propose a Zero-Label Prompt Selection (ZPS) method that selects prompts without any labeled data or gradient update. Specifically, given the candidate human-written prompts for a task, ZPS labels a set of unlabeled data with a prompt ensemble and uses the pseudo-labels for prompt selection. Experiments show that ZPS improves over prior methods by a sizeable margin in zero-label performance. We also extend ZPS to a few-shot setting and show its advantages over strong baselines such as prompt tuning and model tuning.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.04668,
  title  = {Zero-Label Prompt Selection},
  author = {Chonghua Liao and Yanan Zheng and Zhilin Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.04668},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T05:28:16.901Z