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Related papers: Prompt Stability Matters: Evaluating and Optimizin…

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The rise of large language models (LLMs) has highlighted the importance of prompt engineering as a crucial technique for optimizing model outputs. While experimentation with various prompting methods, such as Few-shot, Chain-of-Thought, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Michael Hewing , Vincent Leinhos

Large Language Models, particularly decoder-only generative models such as GPT, are increasingly used to automate Software Engineering tasks. These models are primarily guided through natural language prompts, making prompt engineering a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander Korn , Lea Zaruchas , Chetan Arora , Andreas Metzger , Sven Smolka , Fanyu Wang , Andreas Vogelsang

LLMs are highly sensitive to prompt phrasing, yet standard benchmarks typically report performance using a single prompt, raising concerns about the reliability of such evaluations. In this work, we argue for a stochastic method of moments…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Gili Lior , Eliya Habba , Shahar Levy , Avi Caciularu , Gabriel Stanovsky

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as decision-support tools in data-constrained scientific workflows, where correctness and validity are critical. However, evaluation practices often emphasize stability or reproducibility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Nazia Riasat

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved widespread success on a variety of in-context few-shot tasks, but this success is typically evaluated via correctness rather than consistency. We argue that self-consistency is an important…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Angelica Chen , Jason Phang , Alicia Parrish , Vishakh Padmakumar , Chen Zhao , Samuel R. Bowman , Kyunghyun Cho

The recent explosion in the capabilities of large language models has led to a wave of interest in how best to prompt a model to perform a given task. While it may be tempting to simply choose a prompt based on average performance on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Thomas P. Zollo , Todd Morrill , Zhun Deng , Jake C. Snell , Toniann Pitassi , Richard Zemel

Continual learning empowers models to adapt autonomously to the ever-changing environment or data streams without forgetting old knowledge. Prompt-based approaches are built on frozen pre-trained models to learn the task-specific prompts…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Zhanxin Gao , Jun Cen , Xiaobin Chang

System prompts - instructions that shape the behaviour of generative AI systems - strongly influence system outputs and users' experiences. They define the model's guidelines, `personality', and guardrails, taking precedence over user…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Anna Neumann , Yulu Pi , Jatinder Singh

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

Text-to-image models have shown remarkable progress in generating high-quality images from user-provided prompts. Despite this, the quality of these images varies due to the models' sensitivity to human language nuances. With advancements…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Xinrui Yang , Zhuohan Wang , Anthony Hu

Large language models (LLMs) have become indispensable for automated code generation, yet the quality and security of their outputs remain a critical concern. Existing studies predominantly concentrate on adversarial attacks or inherent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Bin Wang , YiLu Zhong , MiDi Wan , WenJie Yu , YuanBing Ouyang , Yenan Huang , Hui Li

Finding appropriate prompts for the specific task has become an important issue as the usage of Large Language Models (LLM) has expanded. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely used for prompt tuning, but its inherent instability and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Minchan Kwon , Gaeun Kim , Jongsuk Kim , Haeil Lee , Junmo Kim

This comprehensive review delves into the pivotal role of prompt engineering in unleashing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), from its inception in the 1950s to the emergence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Banghao Chen , Zhaofeng Zhang , Nicolas Langrené , Shengxin Zhu

Large language models (LLMs) show impressive abilities via few-shot prompting. Commercialized APIs such as OpenAI GPT-3 further increase their use in real-world language applications. However, the crucial problem of how to improve the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Chenglei Si , Zhe Gan , Zhengyuan Yang , Shuohang Wang , Jianfeng Wang , Jordan Boyd-Graber , Lijuan Wang

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in decision-making, but their reliability, especially in critical tasks like healthcare, is not well-established. Therefore, understanding how LLMs reason and make decisions is crucial for their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Ze Yu Zhang , Arun Verma , Finale Doshi-Velez , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Systems often repeat the same prompt to large language models (LLMs) and aggregate responses to improve reliability. This short note analyzes an estimator of the self-consistency of LLMs and the tradeoffs it induces under a fixed compute…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Robert Nowak

Most prompt-optimization methods refine a single static template, making them ineffective in complex and dynamic user scenarios. Existing query-dependent approaches rely on unstable textual feedback or black-box reward models, providing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Ke Chen , Yifeng Wang , Hassan Almosapeeh , Haohan Wang

In the era of large language models (LLMs), code benchmarks have become an important research area in software engineering and are widely used by practitioners. These benchmarks evaluate the performance of LLMs on specific code-related…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Zhiyuan Pan , Xing Hu , Xin Xia , Xiaohu Yang

Just like the previous generation of task-tuned models, large language models (LLMs) that are adapted to tasks via prompt-based methods like in-context-learning (ICL) perform well in some setups but not in others. This lack of consistency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Lucas Weber , Elia Bruni , Dieuwke Hupkes

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted as a fundamental component of language technologies, it is crucial to accurately characterize their performance. Because choices in prompt design can strongly influence model behavior, this design…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Melanie Sclar , Yejin Choi , Yulia Tsvetkov , Alane Suhr