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 (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Danila Lapokin | Andrey Savchenko
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
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.