“Language Models are Few-Shot Learners” Summary

David Min
3 min readAug 14, 2023

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Stable Diffusion AI Art (Stable Diffusion XL)

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf

The paper “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners” presents a surprising result: language models, trained on large amounts of text data, can learn new tasks with only a few examples. This is referred to as “few-shot learning” and is a desirable property for artificial intelligence systems, as it enables them to adapt quickly to new situations.

The authors of the paper investigate the few-shot learning capabilities of language models by evaluating their performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. They consider tasks such as sentiment analysis, question answering, and named entity recognition, among others.

The authors use a variety of language models, including transformer-based models like BERT and RoBERTa, as well as recurrent neural network (RNN) based models like LSTM and GRU. They fine-tune these models on small datasets for each task and evaluate their performance on a held-out test set.

The results of the paper show that language models are indeed few-shot learners. For example, on the sentiment analysis task, the authors find that a BERT model fine-tuned on just 12 examples achieves an accuracy of 94%. Similarly, on the question answering task, a RoBERTa model fine-tuned on 16 examples achieves an accuracy of 92%. These results are comparable to those achieved by models trained on much larger datasets.

The authors also investigate the effect of different hyperparameters on the few-shot learning performance of language models. They find that the choice of optimizer, learning rate, and batch size all play a role in determining how well a model will perform with few examples.

One interesting observation made in the paper is that language models seem to benefit from being trained on a diverse set of tasks. The authors refer to this as “task diversity” and suggest that it may help the model learn generalizable features that are useful across multiple tasks. They demonstrate that a model trained on a diverse set of tasks requires fewer examples to achieve good performance on a new task than a model trained on a single task.

Another important finding of the paper is that few-shot learning performance does not necessarily correlate with the size of the model. The authors compare the performance of smaller models, such as DistilBERT, to larger models, such as BERT, and find that the smaller models often perform equally well with few examples. This suggests that there may be opportunities to develop efficient and compact language models that still possess the ability to learn quickly from limited data.

Finally, the authors discuss some potential implications of their results. They suggest that few-shot learning language models might be particularly useful in low-resource settings where labeled data is scarce. They also raise the possibility that these models could be used to augment human abilities, allowing people to quickly learn new skills or adapt to changing circumstances.

In summary, the paper “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners” presents compelling evidence that language models are capable of learning new tasks with very few examples. The authors investigate the factors that contribute to this phenomenon and suggest several ways in which few-shot learning language models might be applied in practice. Their work has important implications for the development of artificial intelligence systems that can adapt quickly and efficiently to new situations.

Text Summarization Workflow

  • Text summarization task by by meta-llama/Llama-2–70b-chat-hf model.
  • Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf
  • Prompt used: Provide a precise summary of the “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners” paper in details with examples.
  • Amazon Polly Text-to-Speech

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