Papers › GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-shot Learning

GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-shot Learning

31 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.17041archive 2025-07-28

Hanwei Xu, Yujun Chen, Yulun Du, Nan Shao, Yanggang Wang, Haiyu Li, Zhilin Yang

Prompt-based techniques have demostrated great potential for improving the few-shot generalization of pretrained language models. However, their performance heavily relies on the manual design of prompts and thus requires a lot of human efforts. In this paper, we introduce Genetic Prompt Search (GPS) to improve few-shot learning with prompts, which utilizes a genetic algorithm to automatically search for high-performing prompts. GPS is gradient-free and requires no update of model parameters but only a small validation set. Experiments on diverse datasets proved the effectiveness of GPS, which outperforms manual prompts by a large margin of 2.6 points. Our method is also better than other parameter-efficient tuning methods such as prompt tuning.

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