While learning with limited labelled data can improve performance when the labels are lacking, it is also sensitive to the effects of uncontrolled randomness introduced by so-called randomness factors (e.g., varying order of data). We propose a method to systematically investigate the effects of randomness factors while taking the interactions between them into consideration. To measure the true effects of an individual randomness factor, our method mitigates the effects of other factors and observes how the performance varies across multiple runs. Applying our method to multiple randomness factors across in-context learning and fine-tuning approaches on 7 representative text classification tasks and meta-learning on 3 tasks, we show that: 1) disregarding interactions between randomness factors in existing works caused inconsistent findings due to incorrect attribution of the effects of randomness factors, such as disproving the consistent sensitivity of in-context learning to sample order even with random sample selection; and 2) besides mutual interactions, the effects of randomness factors, especially sample order, are also dependent on more systematic choices unexplored in existing works, such as number of classes, samples per class or choice of prompt format.

Learning with limited labelled data, such as few-shot learning, meta-learning or transfer learning, aims to effectively train a model using only small amount of labelled samples. However, these approaches were observed to be excessively sensitive to the effects of uncontrolled randomness caused by non-determinism in the training process. The randomness negatively affects the stability of the models, leading to large variance in results across training runs. When such instability is disregarded, it can unintentionally, but unfortunately also intentionally, create an imaginary perception of research progress. Recently, this area started to attract a research attention and the number of relevant studies is continuously growing. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of 134 papers addressing the effects of randomness on the stability of learning with limited labelled data. We distinguish between four main tasks addressed in the papers (investigate/evaluate; determine; mitigate; benchmark/compare/report randomness effects), providing findings for each one. Furthermore, we identify and discuss seven challenges and open problems together with possible directions to facilitate further research. The ultimate goal of this survey is to emphasise the importance of this growing research area, which so far has not received appropriate level of attention.