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Large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success across diverse tasks, and fine-tuning is sometimes needed to further enhance generation quality. Most existing methods rely on human supervision or parameter retraining, both of which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zhen-Yu Zhang , Jiandong Zhang , Huaxiu Yao , Gang Niu , Masashi Sugiyama

An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model outputs. While recent Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 MohammadReza Davari , Utkarsh Garg , Weixin Cai , Eugene Belilovsky

Large language models (LLMs) typically operate in a question-answering paradigm, where the quality of the input prompt critically affects the response. Automated Prompt Optimization (APO) aims to overcome the cognitive biases of manually…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jian Zhang , Zhangqi Wang , Haiping Zhu , Kangda Cheng , Kai He , Bo Li , Qika Lin , Jun Liu , Erik Cambria

When the quality of naive prompts is carefully optimized by human experts, the task performance of large language models (LLMs) can be significantly improved. However, expert-based prompt optimizations are expensive. Herein, some works have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Junru Lu , Siyu An , Min Zhang , Yulan He , Di Yin , Xing Sun

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adapted to downstream tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which often require thousands of rollouts to learn new tasks. We argue that…

Instruction fine-tuning has conventionally been employed to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to a variety of tasks. Nonetheless, this technique often necessitates substantial computational resources, making it impractical for deployment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Zhenting Qi , Xiaoyu Tan , Shaojie Shi , Chao Qu , Yinghui Xu , Yuan Qi

Automatic prompt optimization (APO) hinges on the quality of its evaluation signal, yet scoring every prompt candidate on the full training set is prohibitively expensive. Existing methods either fix a single evaluation subset before…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xiaoyu Ma , Yiwen Li , Haoyue Liu , Zhichao Wang , Ye Chen , Yongxin Guo , Xiaoying Tang

By conditioning on natural language instructions, large language models (LLMs) have displayed impressive capabilities as general-purpose computers. However, task performance depends significantly on the quality of the prompt used to steer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-13 Yongchao Zhou , Andrei Ioan Muresanu , Ziwen Han , Keiran Paster , Silviu Pitis , Harris Chan , Jimmy Ba

Large Language Models utilizing reasoning techniques improve task performance but incur significant latency and token costs due to verbose generation. Existing automatic prompt optimization(APO) frameworks target task accuracy exclusively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Deep Shah , Sanket Badhe , Nehal Kathrotia , Priyanka Tiwari

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities as cost-effective and reference-free evaluators for assessing language generation quality. In particular, pairwise LLM evaluators, which compare two generated texts and determine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Han Zhou , Xingchen Wan , Yinhong Liu , Nigel Collier , Ivan Vulić , Anna Korhonen

Careful prompt design is critical to the use of large language models in zero-shot or few-shot learning. As a consequence, there is a growing interest in automated methods to design optimal prompts. In this work, we propose Test-time Prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Tianjun Zhang , Xuezhi Wang , Denny Zhou , Dale Schuurmans , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a widely used parameter-efficient fine-tuning method. In standard LoRA layers, one of the matrices, $A$ or $B$, is initialized to zero, ensuring that fine-tuning starts from the pretrained model. However, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Shiwei Li , Xiandi Luo , Xing Tang , Haozhao Wang , Hao Chen , Weihong Luo , Yuhua Li , Xiuqiang He , Ruixuan Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate substantively relevant content but fail to adhere to formal constraints, leading to outputs that are conceptually correct but procedurally flawed. Traditional prompt refinement approaches focus on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Alberto Purpura , Li Wang , Sahil Badyal , Eugenio Beaufrand , Adam Faulkner

Despite significant progress, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still struggle with complex visual reasoning, where multi-step dependencies cause early errors to cascade through the reasoning chain. Existing post-training paradigms are limited:…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Yanbei Jiang , Chao Lei , Yihao Ding , Krista Ehinger , Jey Han Lau

This study explores a novel approach to enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the optimization of input data within prompts. While previous research has primarily focused on refining instruction components and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Sam Lin , Wenyue Hua , Lingyao Li , Zhenting Wang , Yongfeng Zhang

Current Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation frameworks utilize the same static prompt template across all models under evaluation. This differs from the common industry practice of using prompt optimization (PO) techniques to optimize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Nicholas Sadjoli , Tim Siefken , Atin Ghosh , Yifan Mai , Daniel Dahlmeier

Optimization is ubiquitous. While derivative-based algorithms have been powerful tools for various problems, the absence of gradient imposes challenges on many real-world applications. In this work, we propose Optimization by PROmpting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Chengrun Yang , Xuezhi Wang , Yifeng Lu , Hanxiao Liu , Quoc V. Le , Denny Zhou , Xinyun Chen

Unsupervised automatic readability assessment (ARA) methods have important practical and research applications (e.g., ensuring medical or educational materials are suitable for their target audiences). In this paper, we propose a new…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Riley Grossman , Yi Chen

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally relies on costly training and human preference annotations. Self-alignment seeks to reduce these expenses by enabling models to align themselves. To further lower costs and achieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Somanshu Singla , Zhen Wang , Tianyang Liu , Abdullah Ashfaq , Zhiting Hu , Eric P. Xing

Automatic prompt optimization is a promising approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, yet existing methods typically search for a specific prompt specialized to a fixed task. This paradigm limits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Guanbao Liang , Yuanchen Bei , Sheng Zhou , Yuheng Qin , Huan Zhou , Bingxin Jia , Bin Li , Jiajun Bu