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Few-Shot Prompting

A prompting technique in RAG and AI agent workflows where a small number of input-output examples are included in the context to guide the LLM’s reasoning, output schema, or tool-calling logic. It leverages in-context learning to improve accuracy on domain-specific tasks, though it involves a trade-off of higher token costs and increased inference latency per request.

Definition

A prompting technique in RAG and AI agent workflows where a small number of input-output examples are included in the context to guide the LLM’s reasoning, output schema, or tool-calling logic. It leverages in-context learning to improve accuracy on domain-specific tasks, though it involves a trade-off of higher token costs and increased inference latency per request.

Disambiguation

Not to be confused with fine-tuning (weight updates) or zero-shot prompting (no examples provided).

Visual Metaphor

"A set of three solved practice problems provided at the top of a worksheet to demonstrate the required method for the remaining questions."

Key Tools
LangChain (FewShotPromptTemplate)LlamaIndexDSPyOpenAI APISemantic Kernel
Related Connections

Conceptual Overview

A prompting technique in RAG and AI agent workflows where a small number of input-output examples are included in the context to guide the LLM’s reasoning, output schema, or tool-calling logic. It leverages in-context learning to improve accuracy on domain-specific tasks, though it involves a trade-off of higher token costs and increased inference latency per request.

Disambiguation

Not to be confused with fine-tuning (weight updates) or zero-shot prompting (no examples provided).

Visual Analog

A set of three solved practice problems provided at the top of a worksheet to demonstrate the required method for the remaining questions.

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