Recent advances have shown that optimizing prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs) can significantly improve task performance, yet many optimization techniques rely on heuristics or manual exploration. We present LatentPrompt, a model-agnostic framework for prompt optimization that leverages latent semantic space to automatically generate, evaluate, and refine candidate prompts without requiring hand-crafted rules. Beginning with a set of seed prompts, our method embeds them in a continuous latent space and systematically explores this space to identify prompts that maximize task-specific performance. In a proof-of-concept study on the Financial PhraseBank sentiment classification benchmark, LatentPrompt increased classification accuracy by approximately 3 percent after a single optimization cycle. The framework is broadly applicable, requiring only black-box access to an LLM and an automatic evaluation metric, making it suitable for diverse domains and tasks.
@article{arxiv.2508.02452,
title = {LatentPrompt: Optimizing Promts in Latent Space},
author = {Mateusz Bystroński and Grzegorz Piotrowski and Nitesh V. Chawla and Tomasz Kajdanowicz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02452},
year = {2025}
}