Cold-Start Data Selection for Better Few-shot Language Model Fine-tuning: A Prompt-based Uncertainty Propagation Approach

We present PATRON, a prompt-based data selection method for pre-trained language model fine-tuning under cold-start scenarios, i.e., no initial labeled data are available. In PATRON, we design (1) a prompt-based uncertainty propagation approach to estimate the importance of data points and (2) a partition-then-rewrite (PTR) strategy to promote sample diversity when querying for annotations. Experiments on six text classification datasets show that PATRON outperforms the strongest cold-start data selection baselines by up to 6.9%. Besides, with 128 labels only, PATRON achieves 91.0% and 92.1% of the fully supervised performance based on vanilla fine-tuning and prompt-based learning respectively. Our implementation of PATRON will be published upon acceptance.