Challenge: Active learning strategies struggle with a ‘cold-start’ problem, needing substantial initial data to be effective.
Approach: They propose an active learning approach that leverages Large Language Models such as GPT-4, o1, Llama 3, or Mistral Large for selecting instances.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing methods ADAPET, PERFECT, and SetFit in few-shot scenarios and can be extended to non-few scenarios.

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Active Few-Shot Learning for Text Classification (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have boosted the use of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) methods in natural language processing.
Approach: They propose a method that identifies effective support instances from the unlabeled pool and can work with different LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on five tasks on which it is tested on five LLMs.
Active Learning Principles for In-Context Learning with Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: In-context learning has significantly enhanced predictive performance in few-shot learning settings.
Approach: They propose to use pool-based Active Learning to identify the most informative demonstrations for few-shot learning over a single iteration to identify best demonstrations.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms all other methods, including random sampling, in the analysis of 24 classification and multi-choice tasks.
LLMaAA: Making Large Language Models as Active Annotators (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing supervised learning methods in natural language processing require large amounts of data.
Approach: They propose an active learning loop that takes LLMs as annotators and puts them into an active loop to determine what to annotate efficiently.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models with few-shot performance in two NLP tasks.
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning.
Approach: They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances.
Active Learning for BERT: An Empirical Study (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to deal with data scarcity are active learning (AL) and pre-trained models are not being considered.
Approach: They propose to use active learning techniques to cope with data scarcity in binary text classification scenarios where the annotation budget is very small and the data is often skewed.
Outcome: The proposed methods improve BERT performance in binary text classification scenarios where the annotation budget is very small and the data is often skewed.
Cold-start Active Learning through Self-supervised Language Modeling (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Labeling data is a fundamental bottleneck in machine learning due to annotation cost and time.
Approach: They propose a strategy that uses the pre-training loss to find examples that surprise the model and minimize labeling costs.
Outcome: The proposed approach reduces labeling costs and costs by using pre-trained language models.
Few-shot initializing of Active Learner via Meta-Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent advances in few-shot and zero-shot learning have limited performance in domain specific applications.
Approach: They propose to initialize an active learner with meta-learned parameters and generate task dependent softmax weights for active learning.
Outcome: The proposed method performs better than the baseline at low budget, the authors show . they show that adding meta-learned learning rates and generating the softmax have negative consequences .
Zero- and Few-Shot NLP with Pretrained Language Models (2022.acl-tutorials)

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Challenge: a tutorial aims to introduce NLP researchers to the latest techniques for learning from little-to-no data . aims at bringing interested researchers up to speed about the latest and ongoing techniques .
Approach: They aim to introduce techniques for learning from little-to-no data using pretrained language models.
Outcome: This tutorial aims to bring interested NLP researchers up to speed about recent techniques . it will cover methods from manual engineering, better inference algorithms to better tuning methods .
Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that the GPT-3 model can perform few-shots on language understanding tasks with a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations.
Approach: They propose a technique for fine-tuning language models using a few examples . they propose LM-BFF, which uses prompt-based fine-uning and a pipeline for automating prompt generation .
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms standard fine-tuning procedures on a range of NLP tasks.
Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Generative Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large-scale generative language models such as GPT-3 are competitive few-shot learners.
Approach: They train multilingual generative language models on a corpus covering a diverse set of languages and study their few- and zero-shot learning capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms GPT-3 on 171 out of 182 directions with 32 training examples and surpasses the official supervised baseline in 45 directions.

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