Few-Shot Degradation Is Not What It Seems: Behavioral Evidence, Representation Analysis, and a Random-Text Control Across 12 Models, 2 Tasks, and 2 Architectures

Few-shot prompting sometimes degrades language models instead of helping them, but why this happens is unknown. We evaluate 12 open-weight models on two Ukrainian tasks news classification and legal case outcome prediction and find that the effect is strongly task-dependent: the same models that gai