Exemplar Ordering
Also called demonstration order, order sensitivity.
Exemplar ordering is the arrangement of demonstrations within a few-shot prompt, which can swing accuracy from near state-of-the-art to near chance for the same set of examples.
Description
Lu et al. documented this order sensitivity and proposed selecting performant orderings using a probe set generated by the model itself. The effect is a key reason few-shot results should be reported across several permutations.
Sources
Cite this entry
Protologue. (2026). Exemplar Ordering. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0020). https://protologue.com/t/exemplar-ordering/
BibTeX
@misc{protologue_exemplar_ordering,
title = {Exemplar Ordering},
author = {{Protologue}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.0.0},
note = {Entry PTL-0020},
url = {https://protologue.com/t/exemplar-ordering/}
}