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.
By Qipeng Xie, Zi Liang, Jiafei Wu, Yufei Chen, Weizheng Wang, Wenao Ma, Zhong Ming, Haiqin Yang, Kaishun Wu
arXiv:2607. 14105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For Large Language Models to reliably answer user queries, users must clearly specify requirements, context, and constraints.
By Cedric Richter, Salah Ghamizi, Mike Papadakis
Naive Prompt Optimization (NPO) is a lightweight, single‑lineage method that iteratively refines prompts using a teacher model’s rollout feedback. It matches or surpasses the performance of more complex optimizers like GEPA while requiring fewer rollouts, and its advantage grows with stronger teacher models. In interactive games, NPO remains competitive, and prompts optimized by NPO transfer well to other student models within the same family.
By Yuan Chang, Xiaoqi Chen
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: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: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:2607. 03932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs can be conveniently adapted to a diverse set of tasks, e.
By Shubhadip Nag, Srinjoy Das, Agniva Saha, Anushree Ghosh, Soumi Das, Tarun Kumar, Suparna Bhattacharya, Sourangshu Bhattacharya
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. 28657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often require carefully crafted prompts to unlock their full potential, which can be a barrier for non-expert users.
By Oliver Savolainen, Emanuele Bastianelli, Hosein Azarbonyad
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. 04336v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code generation systems make each LLM call with a model, a prompt, and decoding settings.
By Jingzhi Gong, Jie M. Zhang, Gunel Jahangirova, Dong Huang, Mohammad Reza Mousavi, Mark Harman
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