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
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 351–365
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.naacl-long.17/
- DOI:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.naacl-long.17.pdf