{
  "id": "exemplar-ordering",
  "code": "PTL-0020",
  "term": "Exemplar Ordering",
  "aliases": [
    "demonstration order",
    "order sensitivity"
  ],
  "category": "exemplars",
  "definition": "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.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [
    "few-shot-prompting"
  ],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "exemplar-selection",
    "few-shot-calibration",
    "prompt-sensitivity"
  ],
  "introduced": null,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity",
      "authors": "Lu et al.",
      "year": 2021,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08786"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/exemplar-ordering/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Exemplar Ordering. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0020). https://protologue.com/t/exemplar-ordering/"
}