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Large Transformer models are capable of implementing a plethora of so-called in-context learning algorithms. These include gradient descent, classification, sequence completion, transformation, and improvement. In this work, we investigate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Robert Tjarko Lange , Yingtao Tian , Yujin Tang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into high-stakes applications, making robust safety guarantees a central practical and commercial concern. Existing safety evaluations predominantly rely on fixed collections of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Zafir Shamsi , Nikhil Chekuru , Zachary Guzman , Shivank Garg

Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted the performance of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) on few-shot text classification by employing task-specific prompts. Yet, PLMs are unfamiliar with prompt-style expressions during pre-training, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Jianing Wang , Chengyu Wang , Fuli Luo , Chuanqi Tan , Minghui Qiu , Fei Yang , Qiuhui Shi , Songfang Huang , Ming Gao

We describe PromptBoosting, a query-efficient procedure for building a text classifier from a neural language model (LM) without access to the LM's parameters, gradients, or hidden representations. This form of "black-box" classifier…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Bairu Hou , Joe O'Connor , Jacob Andreas , Shiyu Chang , Yang Zhang

Prompt engineering is an essential technique for enhancing the abilities of large language models (LLMs) by providing explicit and specific instructions. It enables LLMs to excel in various tasks, such as arithmetic reasoning, question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Fobo Shi , Peijun Qing , Dong Yang , Nan Wang , Youbo Lei , Haonan Lu , Xiaodong Lin , Duantengchuan Li

In recent years, the growing interest in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced prompt engineering, transitioning from manual design to model-based optimization. Prompts for LLMs generally comprise two components: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Qinhao Zhou , Xiang Xiang , Kun He , John E. Hopcroft

Large Language Models (LLMs) have already been widely adopted for automated algorithm design, demonstrating strong abilities in generating and evolving algorithms across various fields. Existing work has largely focused on examining their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Qi Huang , Furong Ye , Ananta Shahane , Thomas Bäck , Niki van Stein

Large Language Model (LLM) alignment conventionally relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning based alignment frameworks. These methods typically require labeled or preference datasets and involve updating model weights to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Reem I. Masoud , Martin Ferianc , Philip Treleaven , Miguel Rodrigues

The remarkable advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought about significant improvements in Natural Language Processing(NLP) tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive review of in-context learning techniques, focusing on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Yinheng Li

Methods for adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks and domains have traditionally assumed white-box access to the model, and work by modifying its parameters. However, this is incompatible with a recent trend in the field, where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Aitor Ormazabal , Mikel Artetxe , Eneko Agirre

Since the emergence of large language models, prompt learning has become a popular method for optimizing and customizing these models. Special prompts, such as Chain-of-Thought, have even revealed previously unknown reasoning capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Rui Pan , Shuo Xing , Shizhe Diao , Wenhe Sun , Xiang Liu , Kashun Shum , Renjie Pi , Jipeng Zhang , Tong Zhang

We introduce Directional Stimulus Prompting, a novel framework for guiding black-box large language models (LLMs) toward specific desired outputs. Instead of directly adjusting LLMs, our method employs a small tunable policy model (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Zekun Li , Baolin Peng , Pengcheng He , Michel Galley , Jianfeng Gao , Xifeng Yan

Prompting large language models has gained immense popularity in recent years due to the advantage of producing good results even without the need for labelled data. However, this requires prompt tuning to get optimal prompts that lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Jacob-Junqi Tian , David Emerson , Sevil Zanjani Miyandoab , Deval Pandya , Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari , Faiza Khan Khattak

We study offline black-box optimization (BBO), aiming to discover improved designs from an offline dataset of designs and labels, a problem common in robotics, DNA, and materials science with limited labeled samples. While recent work…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zipeng Sun , Can Chen , Ye Yuan , Haolun Wu , Jiayao Gu , Christopher Pal , Xue Liu

Optimizing instructions for large language models (LLMs) is critical for harnessing their full potential in complex and diverse tasks. However, relying solely on white-box approaches demands extensive computational resources and offers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Yanwei Ren , Liu Liu , Baosheng Yu , Jiayan Qiu , Quan Chen

Various methods for robot design optimization have been developed so far. These methods are diverse, ranging from numerical optimization to black-box optimization. While numerical optimization is fast, it is not suitable for cases involving…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Kento Kawaharazuka , Yoshiki Obinata , Naoaki Kanazawa , Haoyu Jia , Kei Okada

Due to privacy or commercial constraints, large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often offered as black-box APIs. Fine-tuning such models to downstream tasks is challenging because one can neither access the model's internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Maohao Shen , Soumya Ghosh , Prasanna Sattigeri , Subhro Das , Yuheng Bu , Gregory Wornell

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have garnered significant attention for their versatility and potential for solving a wide spectrum of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the cost of running these PLMs may be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Chengcheng Han , Liqing Cui , Renyu Zhu , Jianing Wang , Nuo Chen , Qiushi Sun , Xiang Li , Ming Gao

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in various complex reasoning tasks due to their excellent instruction following capability. However, the model's performance is highly dependent on the open-ended characteristics of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Zhenzhen Huang , Chaoning Zhang , Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari , Jiaquan Zhang , Yitian Zhou , Shuxu Chen , Yang Yang

Prompting techniques have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various complex tasks, including reasoning, planning, and solving math word problems. However, most research has predominantly focused…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Neisarg Dave , Daniel Kifer , C. Lee Giles , Ankur Mali