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.
By Fei Wang, Si Si, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Inderjit S. Dhillon
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...
By Tianyu Yuan, Zhuzhong Qian
arXiv:2603. 18388v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving LLM performance without manual prompt engineering.
By Shiyan Liu, Qifeng Xia, Qiyun Xia, Yisheng Liu, Xinyu Yu, Rui Qu
arXiv:2606. 04661v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prompts tuned for accuracy often grow long, raising inference cost on every model call.
By Shanu Kumar, Shubhanshu Khandelwal, Akhila Yesantarao Venkata, Parag Agrawal, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Manish Gupta
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: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...
By Junyang Chen, Zecheng Wang, Jingbang Chen
arXiv:2606. 19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain.
By Paul Kassianik, Baturay Saglam, Huaibo Zhao, Blaine Nelson, Supriti Vijay, Aman Priyanshu, Amin Karbasi
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.
By Zhaolin Gao (Sid), Yu (Sid), Wang, Bo Liu, Thorsten Joachims, Kiant\'e Brantley, Wen Sun
arXiv:2609.23716v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Textual-gradient methods automate prompt optimization through natural-language feedback, but their iterative updates can be unstable. We identify two...
By Yifan Xu, Yixuan Li, Xinzhuo Li, Yixin Gu, Yifan Shen, Lijun Yu, Haohan Wang
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:2511. 19829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most prompt-optimization methods refine a single static template, making them ineffective in complex and dynamic user scenarios.
By Ke Chen, Yifeng Wang, Hassan Almosapeeh, Haohan Wang
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