arXiv:2511. 19829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most prompt-optimization methods refine a single static template, making them ineffective in complex and dynamic user scenarios.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 27226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating LLM outputs remains a major bottleneck in NLP: human evaluation is expensive and slow, lexical metrics correlate poorly with human judgments on open-ended generation, and holistic LLM judges often produce opaque scores that are hard to debug.
The paper investigates how small lexical changes in prompts can cause large performance swings in large language models. Using a dataset of 132,000 prompt variants, the authors uncover a scaling law linking higher average task performance to lower variance and greater robustness. They identify domain-specific terminology and explicit action directives as key linguistic factors that stabilize prompts, and propose an automated Prompt-Refining Agent that reduces performance variance by 40.7% in code generation while maintaining or improving mean performance.
arXiv:2609.39927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompt optimization improves the performance of language-model systems on downstream tasks by refining their prompts. Classical methods evaluate prompt...
Evaluating LLM outputs remains a major bottleneck in NLP: human evaluation is expensive and slow, lexical metrics correlate poorly with human judgments on open-ended generation, and holistic LLM judges often produce opaque scores that are hard to debug. We propose BINEVAL, a framework that decomposes evaluation criteria into atomic binary questions and aggregates the resulting verdicts into interpretable, multi-dimensional scores.
The paper investigates why prompt optimization works better for some tasks than others by decomposing reward variance into response variance and system‑prompt variance. It finds that optimization succeeds when system‑prompt variance dominates, and that adding more user prompts can actually reduce this variance, especially on heterogeneous datasets. To address this, the authors propose $p1$, a filtering method that selects a small set of high‑variance user prompts, which improves optimization on reasoning benchmarks and even allows a system prompt trained on just two AIME 24 prompts to generalize well.
arXiv:2609.15209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic prompt optimization (APO) improves language-model programs by revising prompts from task feedback, yet it typically holds its training data...
CriticGen introduces a generation‑aware evaluation framework that generates sample‑specific evaluation dimensions and scoring criteria across categories such as subjective, objective, and self‑derived constraints. These dynamic rubrics produce a score, reason, executable refinement suggestion, and a refined answer, enabling models to diagnose and target flaws in their responses. Experiments show significant gains in rubric quality, score correlation, and actionable feedback, with 73.17% of answers improved and a 93.28% non‑degradation rate.
arXiv:2606. 11459v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are highly sensitive to prompt formulation, necessitating automatic prompt optimization to unlock their full potential.
arXiv:2607. 14105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For Large Language Models to reliably answer user queries, users must clearly specify requirements, context, and constraints.
The paper introduces F$^{2}$DR, a fine‑grained reward framework designed to evaluate end‑to‑end DeepSearch workflows, which involve planning, reflection, retrieval, and answer generation. F$^{2}$DR assesses workflows along three dimensions—Content, Trajectory, and Answer—to provide a comprehensive process‑level evaluation. The authors also present DeepSearch RM‑Bench, a benchmark that tests reward models in DeepSearch scenarios and shows strong discriminative power over existing open‑source models.