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Related papers: Demystifying optimized prompts in language models

200 papers

Prompts have been shown to be an effective method to adapt a frozen Pretrained Language Model (PLM) to perform well on downstream tasks. Prompts can be represented by a human-engineered word sequence or by a learned continuous embedding. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Jonathan Pilault , Can Liu , Mohit Bansal , Markus Dreyer

Large language models (LLMs) effectively generate fluent text when the target output follows natural language patterns. However, structured prediction tasks confine the output format to a limited ontology, causing even very large models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Derek Chen , Celine Lee , Yunan Lu , Domenic Rosati , Zhou Yu

Finding the best way of adapting pre-trained language models to a task is a big challenge in current NLP. Just like the previous generation of task-tuned models (TT), models that are adapted to tasks via in-context-learning (ICL) are robust…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Lucas Weber , Elia Bruni , Dieuwke Hupkes

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in a wide-range of language tasks without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. However, they remain prone to hallucinations and inconsistencies, and often struggle with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Matt Pauk , Maria Leonor Pacheco

Prompting language models (LMs) with training examples and task descriptions has been seen as critical to recent successes in few-shot learning. In this work, we show that finetuning LMs in the few-shot setting can considerably reduce the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Robert L. Logan , Ivana Balažević , Eric Wallace , Fabio Petroni , Sameer Singh , Sebastian Riedel

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in learning from explanations in prompts, but there has been limited understanding of exactly how these explanations function or why they are effective. This work aims to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Xi Ye , Srinivasan Iyer , Asli Celikyilmaz , Ves Stoyanov , Greg Durrett , Ramakanth Pasunuru

System prompts provide a lightweight yet powerful mechanism for conditioning large language models (LLMs) at inference time. While prior work has focused on English-only settings, real-world deployments benefit from having a single prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Lechen Zhang , Yusheng Zhou , Tolga Ergen , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Moontae Lee , David Jurgens

Prompt optimization and fine-tuning are two major approaches to improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). They enhance the capabilities of LLMs from complementary perspectives: the former through explicit natural language,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xiaohe Bo , Rui Li , Zexu Sun , Quanyu Dai , Zeyu Zhang , Zihang Tian , Xu Chen , Zhenhua Dong

Prompt quality plays a central role in controlling the behavior, reliability, and reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly for smaller open-source instruction-tuned models that depend heavily on explicit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Prith Sharma , Austin Z. Henley

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown prominent performance in various downstream tasks and prompt engineering plays a pivotal role in optimizing LLMs' performance. This paper, not only as an overview of current prompt engineering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Haochen Li , Jonathan Leung , Zhiqi Shen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in many scenarios, but their performance depends, in part, on the choice of prompt. Past research has focused on optimizing prompts specific to a task. However, much less…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Lechen Zhang , Tolga Ergen , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Moontae Lee , David Jurgens

Interaction with Large Language Models (LLMs) is primarily carried out via prompting. A prompt is a natural language instruction designed to elicit certain behaviour or output from a model. In theory, natural language prompts enable…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Michael Desmond , Michelle Brachman

Probing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) using prompts has indirectly implied that language models (LMs) can be treated as knowledge bases. To this end, this phenomena has been effective especially when these LMs are fine-tuned towards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-08 M. Abaho , D. Bollegala , P. Williamson , S. Dodd

The wayward quality of continuous prompts stresses the importance of their interpretability as unexpected and unpredictable behaviors appear following training, especially in the context of large language models automating people-sensitive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Pascal Passigan , Kidus Yohannes , Joshua Pereira

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as these models become increasingly integrated into various societal and decision-making processes. Traditional methods, such as reinforcement learning from human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Prashant Trivedi , Souradip Chakraborty , Avinash Reddy , Vaneet Aggarwal , Amrit Singh Bedi , George K. Atia

Large language models (LLMs) can perform recommendation tasks by taking prompts written in natural language as input. Compared to traditional methods such as collaborative filtering, LLM-based recommendation offers advantages in handling…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Genki Kusano , Kosuke Akimoto , Kunihiro Takeoka

Large Language Models (LLMs) are nowadays extensively used for various types of software engineering tasks, primarily code generation. Previous research has shown how suitable prompt engineering could help developers in improving their code…

Prompt underspecification is a common challenge when interacting with LLMs. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of this problem, showing that while LLMs can often infer unspecified requirements by default (41.1%), such behavior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Chenyang Yang , Yike Shi , Qianou Ma , Michael Xieyang Liu , Christian Kästner , Tongshuang Wu

Large Language Models are expressive tools that enable complex tasks of text understanding within Computational Social Science. Their versatility, while beneficial, poses a barrier for establishing standardized best practices within the…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Anders Giovanni Møller , Luca Maria Aiello

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), generating rule-based data for real-world applications has become more accessible. Due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language and the complexity of rule sets, especially in long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Teng Wang , Zhenqi He , Wing-Yin Yu , Xiaojin Fu , Xiongwei Han