{
  "id": "exemplar-selection",
  "code": "PTL-0019",
  "term": "Exemplar Selection",
  "aliases": [
    "demonstration selection",
    "dynamic few-shot",
    "kNN prompting"
  ],
  "category": "exemplars",
  "definition": "Exemplar selection is the choice of which demonstrations to include in a few-shot prompt, commonly by retrieving the examples most semantically similar to the current input.",
  "description": "Liu et al. showed that retrieving nearest-neighbor examples by embedding similarity outperformed random selection. Selection can also target diversity, difficulty, or the model's uncertainty, as in active prompting.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [
    "few-shot-prompting"
  ],
  "narrower": [
    "active-prompting"
  ],
  "related": [
    "exemplar-ordering",
    "retrieval-augmented-generation"
  ],
  "introduced": null,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?",
      "authors": "Liu et al.",
      "year": 2021,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06804"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/exemplar-selection/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Exemplar Selection. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0019). https://protologue.com/t/exemplar-selection/"
}