Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search.
arXiv:2507. 09839v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model behavior.
By MohammadReza Davari, Utkarsh Garg, Weixin Cai, Eugene Belilovsky
arXiv:2608. 10471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompt optimizers automate the search for prompts that improve language-model performance, but existing methods rely on a predefined optimization procedure: the algorithm determines which candidates to explore and how the search progresses, while the language model generates or refines prompt proposals.
By Subhash Bangalore Satheesha, Nirvik Pande, Deepthi Duddempudi, Bharath Dandala
arXiv:2608. 11219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) often rewrites prompts monolithically, which can improve one behavior while degrading others.
By Nikita Kulin, Viktor Zhuravlev, Artur Khairullin, Sergey Muravyov, Ilya Makarov, Daniil Sukhorukov, Ekaterina Averkova
arXiv:2607. 29626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs evolve from code completion systems into autonomous scientific agents, evaluating their ability to conduct experiments has become increasingly important.
By Tianyu Huai, Tingshuo Fan, Xinchi Chen, Yining Zheng, Yuxin Wang, Shuang Chen, Jie Zhou, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv:2511. 19829v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prompt optimization has become a central mechanism for eliciting strong performance from LLMs, and recent work has made substantial progress by proposing diverse prompt evaluation metrics and optimization strategies.
By Ke Chen, Yifeng Wang, Hassan Almosapeeh, Haohan Wang
arXiv:2606. 30840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are becoming central to information retrieval: they issue retrieval queries, synthesize answers, and increasingly serve as judges for IR evaluation.
By Derek Koh, Jinghui Mo, Benjamin H. Le, Jiening Zhan, Baofen Zheng, Kevin Bevis, Nathaniel C. Owen, Lauren Elizabeth Charney, Wenqiong Liu, Jingwei Wu
arXiv:2606. 04465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: System prompt optimization improves agent behavior without modifying the underlying model, yielding human-readable, model-agnostic instructions.
By Wangcheng Tao, Han Wu, Weng-Fai Wong
arXiv:2607. 02057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, it has become increasingly evident that large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents raise the level of abstraction in software development by shifting the focus from writing precise procedures to expressing intents and goals.
By Florian Tambon, Michael Konstantinou, Cedric Richter, Charles Chenouard, Mark Harman, Mike Papadakis
arXiv:2606. 03467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit remarkable collaborative capabilities in complex multi-step tasks.
By Taiyu Zhu, Yifan Wu, Weilin Jin, Ying Li, Gang Huang
arXiv:2608. 06714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent systems for optimizing prompts, programs, and ML workflows typically rely on explicit outer-loop controllers such as evolutionary search, bandits, or textual-gradient methods.
By Junbo Li, Boyi Liu, Canwen Xu, Yite Wang, Yuxiong He, Zhangyang Wang, Qiang Liu, Zhewei Yao
arXiv:2605. 11599v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fixed reasoning benchmarks evaluate canonical prompts, but semantically valid changes in presentation can still change model behavior.
By Hongmin Li