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fewshotcurve

null resultPython · CPUModel behavior & reasoningJuly 6, 2026

the question

Does few-shot prompting help instruction-tuned models?

what came out

No significant gain on either Qwen2.5-1.5B or 0.5B (McNemar p=0.22, p=1.0) at 4-16x the prompt-token cost -- the near-null transfers across sizes. First cross-model-validated factory study. Honest negative.

method & receipts

  • Result: null result — an honest negative, reported as it came out.
  • Reproducible one script re-runs the whole thing from scratch.
  • Independently reviewed an adversarial review pass, kept in the repo.
  • Machine-readable claims every reported number, in a checkable file.
  • Tested — a correctness/benchmark suite ships alongside the code.

→ read the code and re-run it

github.com/v-code01/fewshotcurve