Eduardo Blanco

Aunabil Chakma, Mihai Surdeanu, Eduardo Blanco

This paper presents several strategies to automatically obtain additional examples for in-context learning of one-shot relation extraction. Specifically, we introduce a novel strategy for example selection, in which new examples are selected based on the similarity of their underlying syntactic-semantic structure to the provided one-shot example. We show that this method results in complementary word choices and sentence structures when compared to LLM-generated examples. When these strategies are combined, the resulting hybrid system achieves a more holistic picture of the relations of interest than either method alone. Our framework transfers well across datasets (FS-TACRED and FS-FewRel) and LLM families (Qwen and Gemma). Overall, our hybrid selection method consistently outperforms alternative strategies and achieves state-of-the-art performance on FS-TACRED and strong gains on a customized FewRel subset.

Mayank Singh, Vikas Yadav, Eduardo Blanco

Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) is a powerful approach for extracting performance from large language models without modifying their weights. Many existing methods rely on trial-and-error, testing different prompts or in-context examples until a good configuration emerges, often consuming substantial compute. Recently, natural language feedback derived from execution logs has shown promise as a way to identify how prompts can be improved. However, most prior approaches operate in a bottom-up manner, iteratively adjusting the prompt based on feedback from individual problems, which can cause them to lose the global perspective. In this work, we propose Error Taxonomy-Guided Prompt Optimization (ETGPO), a prompt optimization algorithm that adopts a top-down approach. ETGPO focuses on the global failure landscape by collecting model errors, categorizing them into a taxonomy, and augmenting the prompt with guidance targeting the most frequent failure modes. Across multiple benchmarks spanning mathematics, question answering, and logical reasoning, ETGPO achieves accuracy that is comparable to or better than state-of-the-art methods, while requiring roughly one third of the optimization-phase token usage and evaluation budget.