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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05710 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05710/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [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)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [An Explanation of In-context Learning as Implicit Bayesian Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02080/) (2021)
- [Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08633/) (2021)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [MetaICL: Learning to Learn In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15943/) (2021)
- [Larger language models do in-context learning differently](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03846/) (2023)
- [Beam Search Strategies for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01806/) (2017)
- [Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Implicitly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10559/) (2022)
- [Active Example Selection for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04486/) (2022)
- [Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07004/) (2023)
- [Self-Adaptive In-Context Learning: An Information Compression Perspective for In-Context Example Selection and Ordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10375/) (2022)
- [What In-Context Learning "Learns" In-Context: Disentangling Task Recognition and Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09731/) (2023)
- [IndicTrans2: Towards High-Quality and Accessible Machine Translation Models for all 22 Scheduled Indian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16307/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Are Latent Variable Models: Explaining and Finding Good Demonstrations for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11916/) (2023)
- [Compositional Exemplars for In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05698/) (2023)
- [Unified Demonstration Retriever for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04320/) (2023)
- [Diverse Demonstrations Improve In-context Compositional Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06800/) (2022)
- [Ground-Truth Labels Matter: A Deeper Look into Input-Label Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12685/) (2022)
- [Differentiable Prompt Makes Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13161/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Relic: Enhancing Reward Model Generalization for Low-Resource Indic Languages with Few-Shot Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16502/) (2025)
- [NormGenesis: Multicultural Dialogue Generation via Exemplar-Guided Social Norm Modeling and Violation Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18395/) (2025)
- [MERIT: Multilingual Expert-Reward Informed Tuning for Chinese-Centric Low-Resource Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04839/) (2026)
- [KITE: Kernelized and Information Theoretic Exemplars for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15676/) (2025)
- [TRepLiNa: Layer-wise CKA+REPINA Alignment Improves Low-Resource Machine Translation in Aya-23 8B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06249/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.