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Concept

Few-shot

Solving a task with a handful of demonstrations included directly in the prompt.

Definition

Few-shot prompting embeds a few (typically 2–16) labelled examples in the input before the test query. The model imitates their format and reasoning style — no weights are updated. It is the workhorse pattern when zero-shot quality is insufficient but fine-tuning is overkill.

Common use cases

  • Classification
  • Format imitation
  • Code style transfer

Related terms

Zero-shot
In-context Learning
Prompt Engineering
Few-shot Prompting
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    Few-shot — AI Glossary | Railwail