Few-shot prompting

How it is used

Contrasted with zero-shot prompting, where you give only instructions and no examples. People say 'add a few shots' or 'a three-shot prompt'. The examples should be varied and match the real input format closely.

Example sentences

1. Few-shot prompting with five labeled tickets worked better than a long list of rules.

2. Zero-shot was fine for English, but Turkish needed few-shot prompting.

Common collocations

• few-shot examples
• zero-shot prompting
• few-shot setting
• three-shot prompt

Related terms

• promptThe text or other input given to a generative model to tell it what to do, such as a question, an instruction or a few examples followed by a task.
• prompt engineeringThe practice of designing, testing and improving prompts so that a model gives accurate, useful and consistent outputs for a task.
• chain of thoughtStep-by-step reasoning that a model writes out before giving its final answer, which often improves results on math, logic and multi-step problems.
• LLMShort for large language model: a very large neural network trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it answer questions, write, summarize and code.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• few-shot prompting · Software Engineering

More terms: Prompts and Retrieval

• system prompt
• RAG
• vector database