Revisiting Automated Prompting: Are We Actually Doing Better?

Yulin Zhou, Yiren Zhao, Ilia Shumailov, Robert Mullins, Yarin Gal

Main: Large Language Models Main-poster Paper

Session 4: Large Language Models (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 11, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Session 4 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: prompting
TLDR: Current literature demonstrates that Large Language Models (LLMs) are great few-shot learners, and prompting significantly increases their performance on a range of downstream tasks in a few-shot learning setting. An attempt to automate human-led prompting followed, with some progress achieved. In p...
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Abstract: Current literature demonstrates that Large Language Models (LLMs) are great few-shot learners, and prompting significantly increases their performance on a range of downstream tasks in a few-shot learning setting. An attempt to automate human-led prompting followed, with some progress achieved. In particular, subsequent work demonstrates that automation can outperform fine-tuning in certain K-shot learning scenarios. In this paper, we revisit techniques for automated prompting on six different downstream tasks and a larger range of K-shot learning settings. We find that automated prompting does not consistently outperform simple manual prompting. Our work suggests that, in addition to fine-tuning, manual prompting should be used as a baseline in this line of research.