# Few-shot Fine-tuning vs. In-context Learning: A Fair Comparison and Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16938 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16938/

## Key facts

- Cited by 136 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [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)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01373/) (2023)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03350/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01130/) (2019)
- [Fine-Tuning Pretrained Language Models: Weight Initializations, Data Orders, and Early Stopping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06305/) (2020)
- [Do Prompt-Based Models Really Understand the Meaning of their Prompts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01247/) (2021)
- [Prompting GPT-3 To Be Reliable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09150/) (2022)
- [On the Stability of Fine-tuning BERT: Misconceptions, Explanations, and Strong Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04884/) (2020)
- [Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06487/) (2022)
- [Lifting the Curse of Multilinguality by Pre-training Modular Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06266/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 136)

- [Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03693/) (2023)
- [Many-Shot In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11018/) (2024)
- [In-Context Learning with Long-Context Models: An In-Depth Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00200/) (2024)
- [A Paradigm Shift in Machine Translation: Boosting Translation Performance of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11674/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Conversational Search: Large Language Model-Aided Informative Query Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09716/) (2023)
- [TPTU: Large Language Model-based AI Agents for Task Planning and Tool Usage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03427/) (2023)
- [Measuring and Controlling Instruction (In)Stability in Language Model Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10962/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models on Code Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01240/) (2023)
- [Fine Tuning vs. Retrieval Augmented Generation for Less Popular Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01432/) (2024)
- [Stress-Testing Capability Elicitation With Password-Locked Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19550/) (2024)
- [Language Models for Text Classification: Is In-Context Learning Enough?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17661/) (2024)
- [On the generalization of language models from in-context learning and finetuning: a controlled study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00661/) (2025)
- [Prompt Optimization with EASE? Efficient Ordering-aware Automated Selection of Exemplars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16122/) (2024)
- [User Inference Attacks on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09266/) (2023)
- [Unveiling the Generalization Power of Fine-Tuned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09162/) (2024)
- [Better Synthetic Data by Retrieving and Transforming Existing Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14361/) (2024)
- [LLMParser: An Exploratory Study on Using Large Language Models for Log Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18001/) (2024)
- [Mind the instructions: a holistic evaluation of consistency and interactions in prompt-based learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13486/) (2023)
- [Reliable LLM-based User Simulator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13374/) (2024)
- [Privacy Preserving Prompt Engineering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06001/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Vision Language Models for Specialized Agricultural Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19617/) (2024)
- [MolecularGPT: Open Large Language Model (LLM) for Few-Shot Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12950/) (2024)
- [Deeper Insights Without Updates: The Power of In-Context Learning Over Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04691/) (2024)
- [Data Whisperer: Efficient Data Selection for Task-Specific LLM Fine-Tuning via Few-Shot In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12212/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Generate Architectural Design Decisions? -An Exploratory Empirical study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01709/) (2024)
- [Can GPT models be Financial Analysts? An Evaluation of ChatGPT and GPT-4 on mock CFA Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08678/) (2023)
- [Comparing Specialised Small and General Large Language Models on Text Classification: 100 Labelled Samples to Achieve Break-Even Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12819/) (2024)
- [Effects of diversity incentives on sample diversity and downstream model performance in LLM-based text augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06643/) (2024)
- [Do Large Language Models Need a Content Delivery Network?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13761/) (2024)
- [Q-Probe: A Lightweight Approach to Reward Maximization for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14688/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot fine-tuning and in-context learning are two alternative strategies for task adaptation of pre-trained language models. Recently, in-context learning has gained popularity over fine-tuning due to its simplicity and improved out-of-domain generalization, and because extensive evidence shows that fine-tuned models pick up on spurious correlations. Unfortunately, previous comparisons of the two approaches were done using models of different sizes. This raises the question of whether the observed weaker out-of-domain generalization of fine-tuned models is an inherent property of fine-tuning or a limitation of the experimental setup. In this paper, we compare the generalization of few-shot fine-tuning and in-context learning to challenge datasets, while controlling for the models used, the number of examples, and the number of parameters, ranging from 125M to 30B. Our results show that fine-tuned language models can in fact generalize well out-of-domain. We find that both approaches generalize similarly; they exhibit large variation and depend on properties such as model size and the number of examples, highlighting that robust task adaptation remains a challenge.