Related papers: ContraPrompt: Contrastive Prompt Optimization via …

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…

The extensive world knowledge and powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention in recommendation systems (RS). Specifically, The chain of thought (CoT) has been shown to improve the…

Large language models exhibit impressive reasoning capabilities yet frequently generate plausible but incorrect solutions, a phenomenon commonly termed hallucination. This paper investigates the effect of training objective composition on…

We introduce CRYSTAL (Clear Reasoning via Yielded Steps, Traceability, and Logic), a diagnostic benchmark with 6,372 instances that evaluates multimodal reasoning through verifiable intermediate steps. We propose two complementary metrics:…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance through explicit chain-of-thought reasoning but suffer from \textit{overthinking}: generating excessive reasoning tokens even for trivial queries. {Beyond inflating cost, overthinking…

Prompt engineering is a challenging yet crucial task for optimizing the performance of large language models on customized tasks. It requires complex reasoning to examine the model's errors, hypothesize what is missing or misleading in the…

Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving LLM performance without manual prompt engineering. Reflective APO methods such as GEPA iteratively refine prompts by diagnosing failure cases, but the…

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an effective paradigm for training large language models to interleave reasoning with search engine calls. However, existing approaches face a fundamental credit assignment problem: methods like…

Chain-of-thought prompting combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose a new decoding strategy, self-consistency, to replace the naive greedy…

Prompt optimization has become a practical way to improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining. However, most existing frameworks treat evaluation as a black box, relying solely on outcome scores without…

LLM performance is highly sensitive to prompt design, yet whether automatic prompt optimization can replace expert prompt engineering in linguistic tasks remains unexplored. We present the first systematic comparison of hand-crafted…

Defect reduction planning plays a vital role in enhancing software quality and minimizing software maintenance costs. By training a black box machine learning model and "explaining" its predictions, explainable AI for software engineering…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable of following instructions and complex reasoning, making prompting a flexible interface for adapting models without parameter updates. Yet prompt design remains labor-intensive…

We demonstrate that Contrastive Decoding -- a simple, computationally light, and training-free text generation method proposed by Li et al 2022 -- achieves large out-of-the-box improvements over greedy decoding on a variety of reasoning…

Logical reading comprehension is a challenging task that entails grasping the underlying semantics of text and applying reasoning to deduce the correct answer. Prior researches have primarily focused on enhancing logical reasoning…

In real life, success is often contingent upon multiple critical steps that are distant in time from each other and from the final reward. These critical steps are challenging to identify with traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods…

Pairwise LLM-as-a-judge evaluation asks the judge to identify the \emph{better} of two candidate answers. We study a one-line modification that asks for the \emph{worse} answer instead and recovers the preference by elimination, a procedure…

Prompt optimization methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning black-box large language models (LLMs). In parallel, inference scaling strategies such as Best-of-N Sampling and Majority Voting have likewise been shown to…

Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation methods can effectively transfer reasoning abilities to base models but suffer from two major limitations: excessive verbosity of reasoning traces and inadequate adaptability to problem…