Danila Lapokin
2026
CRL-Prompt: Contrastive and Reinforcement Learning for Soft Prompt Tuning for Text Classification
Danila Lapokin | Andrey Savchenko
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Danila Lapokin | Andrey Savchenko
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Prompt choice is crucial in adapting language models to text classification tasks, particularly under low-resource conditions. Manual prompt engineering is time-consuming, non-scalable, and brittle, while current auto-prompting techniques are still far from maturity. This paper presents a two-stage method for prompt learning of frozen language models, CRL-Prompt, based on soft prompt initialization followed by contrastive and reinforcement-based refinement. An experimental study demonstrates that our approach achieves consistent improvements in accuracy over baseline prompt tuning strategies, with gains of up to 2.2% while training fewer than 0.25% of model parameters.