Task-Level Natural Language Priors as Learning Signals for Low-Resource LLM Training

arXiv:2609.02244v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often struggle when low-resource training data are ambiguous or incomplete. Task-level natural-language priors can provide useful guidance in such settings, but existing approaches usually treat these priors as input context rather than as learning signals during training. We study how task-level natural-language priors can supply guidance missing from these data through Prior-Guided Tuning (PGT). Its implementation, Contrastive Prior Steering (CPS), retains the supervised objective and adds positive- and negative-prior-conditioned losses with opposing optimization directions. Across AmbiMath, Diagnostic Anchoring, and Jigsaw, CPS achieves near-perfect exact-match accuracy on the synthetic task, improves accuracy under misleading diagnostic suggestions by 8.2 percentage points, and improves average subgroup Macro F1 on Jigsaw by 10.7 percentage points over plain fine-tuning, averaged over the two evaluated models. On Jigsaw, with one tenth of the experimental training data, CPS slightly exceeds full-data plain fine-tuning. These results show how reusable task-level language can complement limited labeled examples without requiring instance-level rationales or preference pairs.