# On Measuring the Intrinsic Few-Shot Hardness of Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09113 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09113/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [WiC: the Word-in-Context Dataset for Evaluating Context-Sensitive Meaning Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09121/) (2018)
- [Parameter-efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning for Transformers via Shared Hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04489/) (2021)
- [Cutting Down on Prompts and Parameters: Simple Few-Shot Learning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13353/) (2021)
- [Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching for Natural Language Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03814/) (2017)
- [Estimating Example Difficulty Using Variance of Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11600/) (2020)
- [Improving and Simplifying Pattern Exploiting Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11955/) (2021)
- [Probing Natural Language Inference Models through Semantic Fragments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07521/) (2019)
- [Pre-Training Transformers as Energy-Based Cloze Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08561/) (2020)
- [Sensitivity as a Complexity Measure for Sequence Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10343/) (2021)
- [Analyzing Compositionality-Sensitivity of NLI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07033/) (2018)
- [Rissanen Data Analysis: Examining Dataset Characteristics via Description Length](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03872/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [How are Prompts Different in Terms of Sensitivity?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07230/) (2023)
- [Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning Using Pointwise V-Usable Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12774/) (2024)
- [Measuring Pointwise V-Usable Information In-Context-ly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12300/) (2023)
- [textitGeoHard: Towards Measuring Class-wise Hardness through Modelling Class Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12512/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While advances in pre-training have led to dramatic improvements in few-shot learning of NLP tasks, there is limited understanding of what drives successful few-shot adaptation in datasets. In particular, given a new dataset and a pre-trained model, what properties of the dataset make it few-shot learnable and are these properties independent of the specific adaptation techniques used? We consider an extensive set of recent few-shot learning methods, and show that their performance across a large number of datasets is highly correlated, showing that few-shot hardness may be intrinsic to datasets, for a given pre-trained model. To estimate intrinsic few-shot hardness, we then propose a simple and lightweight metric called "Spread" that captures the intuition that few-shot learning is made possible by exploiting feature-space invariances between training and test samples. Our metric better accounts for few-shot hardness compared to existing notions of hardness, and is ~8-100x faster to compute.