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Failure of Standard Few-Shot Prompting for Average Calculation

Providing a Large Language Model with a standard few-shot prompt that only includes question-answer pairs without detailed problem-solving steps is often insufficient for complex reasoning tasks. For example, demonstrating that the average of 1{}1, 3{}3, 5{}5, and 7{}7 is 4{}4 does not effectively teach the model how to calculate averages. When subsequently asked to calculate the average of 2{}2, 4{}4, and 9{}9, the model remains unable to derive the correct calculation path and may incorrectly output 7{}7 instead of the correct answer.

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Updated 2026-04-30

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Foundations of Large Language Models

Ch.3 Prompting - Foundations of Large Language Models

Foundations of Large Language Models Course

Computing Sciences