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Prompt engineering plays a critical role in adapting large language models (LLMs) to complex reasoning and labeling tasks without the need for extensive fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt optimization pipeline for frame…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Do Minh Duc , Quan Xuan Truong , Nguyen Tat Dat , Nguyen Van Vinh

Gradient-free prompt optimization methods have made significant strides in enhancing the performance of closed-source Large Language Models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. However, existing approaches make light of the importance of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Muchen Yang , Moxin Li , Yongle Li , Zijun Chen , Chongming Gao , Junqi Zhang , Yangyang Li , Fuli Feng

Prompt optimization has often been framed as a discrete search problem to find high-performing and robust instructions for an LLM. However, the search result might not make it transparent why and where specific prompt changes lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiahui Li , Yarik Menchaca Resendiz , Sean Papay , Roman Klinger

Qualitative analysis plays a pivotal role in understanding the human and social aspects of software engineering. However, it remains a demanding process shaped by the subjective interpretation of individual researchers and sensitive to…

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

Prompt engineering, particularly Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, significantly enhances LLM reasoning capabilities. We introduce "Sculpting," a constrained, rule-based prompting method designed to improve upon standard CoT by reducing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Imran Khan

Prompt optimization aims to find the best prompt to a large language model (LLM) for a given task. LLMs have been successfully used to help find and improve prompt candidates for single-step tasks. However, realistic tasks for agents are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Yongchao Chen , Jacob Arkin , Yilun Hao , Yang Zhang , Nicholas Roy , Chuchu Fan

Optimization is fundamental across numerous disciplines, typically following an iterative process of refining an initial solution to enhance performance. This principle is equally critical in prompt engineering, where designing effective…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Dongyu Chen , Jian Ma , Xianpeng Zhang , Lei Zhang , Haonan Lu , Chen Chen , Chuangchuang Wang , Kai Tang

The promising zero-shot generalization of vision-language models such as CLIP has led to their adoption using prompt learning for numerous downstream tasks. Previous works have shown test-time prompt tuning using entropy minimization to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Jameel Hassan , Hanan Gani , Noor Hussein , Muhammad Uzair Khattak , Muzammal Naseer , Fahad Shahbaz Khan , Salman Khan

The remarkable instruction-following capability of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a growing interest in automatically finding good prompts, i.e., prompt optimization. Most existing works follow the scheme of selecting from a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-03 Chengshuai Shi , Kun Yang , Zihan Chen , Jundong Li , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting emerges as a simple and effective strategy for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) in real-world reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, the efficacy of a singular, task-level prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Xiaosong Yuan , Chen Shen , Shaotian Yan , Xiaofeng Zhang , Liang Xie , Wenxiao Wang , Renchu Guan , Ying Wang , Jieping Ye

Large language models have shown that impressive zero-shot performance can be achieved through natural language prompts (Radford et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020; Sanh et al., 2021). Creating an effective prompt, however, requires…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Gabriel Orlanski

As prompt engineering research rapidly evolves, evaluations beyond accuracy are crucial for developing cost-effective techniques. We present the Economical Prompting Index (EPI), a novel metric that combines accuracy scores with token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Tyler McDonald , Anthony Colosimo , Yifeng Li , Ali Emami

Autonomous crypto trading systems often spend most of their design effort on finding entries, while exits are left to fixed rules that are rarely tested in a systematic way. This paper examines whether better stop-loss and take-profit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Nathan Li , Aikins Laryea , Yigit Ihlamur

Iterative preference optimization methods have recently been shown to perform well for general instruction tuning tasks, but typically make little improvement on reasoning tasks (Yuan et al., 2024, Chen et al., 2024). In this work we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Richard Yuanzhe Pang , Weizhe Yuan , Kyunghyun Cho , He He , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Jason Weston

Majority voting over multiple LLM attempts improves mathematical reasoning, but correlated errors limit the effective sample size. A natural fix is to assign different reasoning strategies to different voters. The approach, Diverse Prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Natapong Nitarach

Language Models are extremely susceptible to performance collapse with even small changes to input prompt strings. Libraries such as DSpy (from Stanford NLP) avoid this problem through demonstration-based prompt optimisation. Inspired by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Maanas Taneja

Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has driven significant gains in LLM-based agentic workflows. However, existing methods treat each task's prompt as a monolithic, instance-blind string optimized through global edits, producing brittle…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jyotirmoy Nath , Neeraj Kumar , Brejesh Lall

AI-mediated communication enables users to communicate more quickly and efficiently. Various systems have been proposed such as smart reply and AI-assisted writing. Yet, the heterogeneity of the forms of inputs and architectures often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Benjamin Towle , Ke Zhou

AI-assisted task delegation is increasingly common, yet human effort in such systems is costly and typically unobserved. Recent work by Bastani and Cachon (2025); Sambasivan et al. (2021) shows that accuracy-based payment schemes suffer…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Qichuan Yin , Ziwei Su , Shuangning Li