# Evaluation of Few-Shot Learning for Classification Tasks in the Polish Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17832 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17832/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01910/) (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)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [Automatic Prompt Optimization with "Gradient Descent" and Beam Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03495/) (2023)
- [Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16797/) (2023)
- [Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15004/) (2023)
- [RLPrompt: Optimizing Discrete Text Prompts with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12548/) (2022)
- [True Few-Shot Learning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11447/) (2021)
- [XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00333/) (2020)
- [The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16884/) (2023)
- [MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12528/) (2023)
- [PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01279/) (2022)
- [ChatGPT Beyond English: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models in Multilingual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05613/) (2023)
- [EvoPrompt: Connecting LLMs with Evolutionary Algorithms Yields Powerful Prompt Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08532/) (2023)
- [CrossFit: A Few-shot Learning Challenge for Cross-task Generalization in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08835/) (2021)
- [Cutting Down on Prompts and Parameters: Simple Few-Shot Learning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13353/) (2021)
- [Don't Trust ChatGPT when Your Question is not in English: A Study of Multilingual Abilities and Types of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16339/) (2023)
- [Translation Artifacts in Cross-lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04721/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PL-Guard: Benchmarking Language Model Safety for Polish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16322/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a few-shot benchmark consisting of 7 different classification tasks native to the Polish language. We conducted an empirical comparison with 0 and 16 shots between fine-tuning, linear probing, SetFit, and in-context learning (ICL) using various pre-trained commercial and open-source models. Our findings reveal that ICL achieves the best performance, with commercial models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 attaining the best performance. However, there remains a significant 14 percentage points gap between our best few-shot learning score and the performance of HerBERT-large fine-tuned on the entire training dataset. Among the techniques, SetFit emerges as the second-best approach, closely followed by linear probing. We observed the worst and most unstable performance with non-linear head fine-tuning. Results for ICL indicate that continual pre-training of models like Mistral-7b or Llama-2-13b on Polish corpora is beneficial. This is confirmed by the improved performances of Bielik-7b and Trurl-13b, respectively. To further support experiments in few-shot learning for Polish, we are releasing handcrafted templates for the ICL.