# Modeling Data Diversity for Joint Instance and Verbalizer Selection in Cold-Start Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00330 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00330/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [Selective Annotation Makes Language Models Better Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01975/) (2022)
- [WARP: Word-level Adversarial ReProgramming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00121/) (2021)
- [Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02035/) (2021)
- [Active Learning by Acquiring Contrastive Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03764/) (2021)
- [Active Learning on a Budget: Opposite Strategies Suit High and Low Budgets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02794/) (2022)
- [Cold-start Active Learning through Self-supervised Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09535/) (2020)
- [Differentiable Prompt Makes Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13161/) (2021)
- [Automatically Identifying Words That Can Serve as Labels for Few-Shot Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13641/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Uncertainty-based Query Strategies for Active Learning with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05687/) (2021)
- [Prototypical Verbalizer for Prompt-based Few-shot Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09770/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised Hierarchical Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11270/) (2018)
- [On Training Instance Selection for Few-Shot Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03176/) (2021)
- [Active Few-Shot Learning with FASL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09347/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Approach to Overcome Perturbation Sensitivity of Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15689/) (2023)
- [Prompt Combines Paraphrase: Teaching Pre-trained Models to Understand Rare Biomedical Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06453/) (2022)
- [Global Prompt Cell: A Portable Control Module for Effective Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05642/) (2023)
- [Manifold-based Verbalizer Space Re-embedding for Tuning-free Prompt-based Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04174/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompt-based methods leverage the knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) trained with a masked language modeling (MLM) objective; however, these methods are sensitive to template, verbalizer, and few-shot instance selection, particularly in cold-start settings with no labeled data. Existing studies overlook the dependency between instances and verbalizers, where instance-label probabilities depend on verbalizer token proximity in the embedding space. To address this, we propose COLDSELECT, a joint verbalizer and instance selection approach that models data diversity. COLDSELECT maps PLM vocabulary and h[MASK] embeddings into a shared space, applying dimensionality reduction and clustering to ensure efficient and diverse selection. By optimizing for minimal uncertainty and maximal diversity, COLDSELECT captures data relationships effectively. Experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate COLDSELECT's superiority in reducing uncertainty and enhancing generalization, outperforming baselines in verbalizer and few-shot instance selection for cold-start scenarios.