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arXiv · 2606.29639

Two-Stage Prompt Optimization for Few-Shot Relation Extraction: From Reasoning-Guided Search to Gradient-Guided Refinement

Aunabil Chakma·Mihai Surdeanu·Eduardo Blanco
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Abstract

Automatic prompt optimization is still underexplored for episodic few-shot relation extraction with smaller language models. We propose a two-stage framework that combines reasoning-based prompt optimization with gradient-based prompt optimization. The first stage can use any reasoning-based optimizer to make broadprompt improvements in natural language. The second stage applies our GradPO, which uses loss and gradient signals to identify high-impact prompt spans and refine them with local edits. Experiments on FS-TACRED and FS-FewRel show that local refinement usually improves prompts found by the first stage, and GradPO is the most consistent refiner. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on FS-TACRED with Qwen3-4B and remains competitive on FS-FewRel.

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Aunabil Chakma, Mihai Surdeanu, Eduardo Blanco. 2026-06-28. Two-Stage Prompt Optimization for Few-Shot Relation Extraction: From Reasoning-Guided Search to Gradient-Guided Refinement. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29639

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