PromptRefine: Enhancing Few-Shot Performance on Low-Resource Indic Languages with Example Selection from related Example Banks

Soumya Suvra Ghosal, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Dinesh Manocha


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive few-shot learning capabilities through in-context learning (ICL). However, ICL performance is highly dependent on the choice of few-shot demonstrations, making the selection of the most optimal examples a persistent research challenge. This issue is further amplified in low-resource Indic languages, where the scarcity of ground-truth data complicates the selection process. In this work, we propose PromptRefine, a novel Alternating Minimization approach for example selection that improves ICL performance on low-resource Indic languages. PromptRefine leverages auxiliary example banks from related high-resource Indic languages and employs multi-task learning techniques to align language-specific retrievers, enabling effective cross-language retrieval. Additionally, we incorporate diversity in the selected examples to enhance generalization and reduce bias. Through comprehensive evaluations on four text generation tasks—Cross-Lingual Question Answering, Multilingual Question Answering, Machine Translation, and Cross-Lingual Summarization using state-of-the-art LLMs such as LLAMA-3.1-8B, LLAMA-2-7B, Qwen-2-7B, and Qwen-2.5-7B, we demonstrate that PromptRefine significantly outperforms existing frameworks for retrieving examples.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
351–365
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.naacl-long.17/
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Cite (ACL):
Soumya Suvra Ghosal, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, and Dinesh Manocha. 2025. PromptRefine: Enhancing Few-Shot Performance on Low-Resource Indic Languages with Example Selection from related Example Banks. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 351–365, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PromptRefine: Enhancing Few-Shot Performance on Low-Resource Indic Languages with Example Selection from related Example Banks (Ghosal et al., NAACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.naacl-long.17.pdf