Reflect then Learn: Active Prompting for Information Extraction Guided by Introspective Confusion

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhao, Dong, Wang, Yadong, Chen, Xiang, Wang, Chenxi, Dai, Hongliang, Geng, Chuanxing, Zhang, Shengzhong, Li, Shaoyuan, Huang, Sheng-Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhao, Dong
Wang, Yadong
Chen, Xiang
Wang, Chenxi
Dai, Hongliang
Geng, Chuanxing
Zhang, Shengzhong
Li, Shaoyuan
Huang, Sheng-Jun
author_facet Zhao, Dong
Wang, Yadong
Chen, Xiang
Wang, Chenxi
Dai, Hongliang
Geng, Chuanxing
Zhang, Shengzhong
Li, Shaoyuan
Huang, Sheng-Jun
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable potential for few-shot information extraction (IE), yet their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of in-context examples. Conventional selection strategies often fail to provide informative guidance, as they overlook a key source of model fallibility: confusion stemming not just from semantic content, but also from the generation of well-structured formats required by IE tasks. To address this, we introduce Active Prompting for Information Extraction (APIE), a novel active prompting framework guided by a principle we term introspective confusion. Our method empowers an LLM to assess its own confusion through a dual-component uncertainty metric that uniquely quantifies both Format Uncertainty (difficulty in generating correct syntax) and Content Uncertainty (inconsistency in extracted semantics). By ranking unlabeled data with this comprehensive score, our framework actively selects the most challenging and informative samples to serve as few-shot exemplars. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding significant improvements in both extraction accuracy and robustness. Our work highlights the critical importance of a fine-grained, dual-level view of model uncertainty when it comes to building effective and reliable structured generation systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10036
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reflect then Learn: Active Prompting for Information Extraction Guided by Introspective Confusion
Zhao, Dong
Wang, Yadong
Chen, Xiang
Wang, Chenxi
Dai, Hongliang
Geng, Chuanxing
Zhang, Shengzhong
Li, Shaoyuan
Huang, Sheng-Jun
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable potential for few-shot information extraction (IE), yet their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of in-context examples. Conventional selection strategies often fail to provide informative guidance, as they overlook a key source of model fallibility: confusion stemming not just from semantic content, but also from the generation of well-structured formats required by IE tasks. To address this, we introduce Active Prompting for Information Extraction (APIE), a novel active prompting framework guided by a principle we term introspective confusion. Our method empowers an LLM to assess its own confusion through a dual-component uncertainty metric that uniquely quantifies both Format Uncertainty (difficulty in generating correct syntax) and Content Uncertainty (inconsistency in extracted semantics). By ranking unlabeled data with this comprehensive score, our framework actively selects the most challenging and informative samples to serve as few-shot exemplars. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding significant improvements in both extraction accuracy and robustness. Our work highlights the critical importance of a fine-grained, dual-level view of model uncertainty when it comes to building effective and reliable structured generation systems.
title Reflect then Learn: Active Prompting for Information Extraction Guided by Introspective Confusion
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10036