Recently introduced language model prompting methods can achieve high accuracy in zero- and few-shot settings while requiring few to no learned task-specific parameters. Nevertheless, these methods still often trail behind full model finetuning. In this work, we investigate if a dedicated continued pretraining stage could improve "promptability", i.e., zero-shot performance with natural language prompts or few-shot performance with prompt tuning. We reveal settings where existing continued pretraining methods lack promptability. We also identify current methodological gaps, which we fill with thorough large-scale experiments. We demonstrate that a simple recipe, continued pretraining that incorporates a trainable prompt during multi-task learning, leads to improved promptability in both zero- and few-shot settings compared to existing methods, up to 31% relative. On the other hand, we find that continued pretraining using MAML-style meta-learning, a method that directly optimizes few-shot promptability, yields subpar performance. We validate our findings with two prompt tuning methods, and, based on our results, we provide concrete recommendations to optimize promptability for different use cases.

本研究探讨了在语言模型提示方法中继续预训练阶段是否能够提高零-shot以及少量样本情况下语言模型的性能，并通过大规模实验表明使用多任务学习的实时递归预训练策略可将零-shot及几轮试验下的效果提高至31%相对性能，然而使用元学习方法的继续预训练阶段的性能不佳。我们提出了针对不同应用的具体推荐，以优化语言模型的性能。

持续预训练以提高零样本和少样本提示能力