Lattice at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Why did the prompt engineer break up with their LLM? Because zero-shot was zero-fun.

AbstractThis paper describes the contribution of theLattice Team to the humor generation MWA-HAHA Sem-Eval shared task on the Englishdata set for subtask A. During the developmentphase, we experimented with two different ap-proaches, but after a quick comparison of theoutputs, it turned out that one was clearly moresuccessful than the other. The winning strategycan be seen as consisting of two phases: first,we used a few-shot framework to let Deepseek-R1 32B generate multiple jokes based on theinput (headlines and word pairs). Second, weset up a voting protocol for Llama-3.1 8B torank the generated jokes and find the funniestone. The other strategy also consisted in twophases: first, we generate many more jokesin a zero-shot way with lighter, faster models,and then we turn back to ranking the generatedjokes, but since we have about ten time morejokes in this second setting, we follow a knock-out tournament procedure in order to find thebest jokes. Our Deepseek-R1 based model isone of the nine systems that shared a first placeon the English data set that received a total of32 valid submissions.