The paper investigates prompt minimization, aiming to reduce prompts to their smallest, most information-dense form without losing output fidelity. It argues that shorter prompts lower computational overhead and inference latency, especially when large contexts are unnecessarily included, and that longer prompts can harm LLM reasoning and accuracy. The authors propose three frameworks to identify minimal prompts and show that these often produce outputs comparable to longer versions, highlighting redundancy in the input space and opening new avenues for efficient prompt engineering.
arXiv:2511.23271v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long system prompts are widely used to steer Large Language Models (LLMs), but repeatedly processing them at inference time is inefficient and cons...
The paper introduces ramework, a blackbox prompt‑minimization framework that identifies the minimal subset of few‑shot prompts necessary for large language models (LLMs). In a case study, the framework reduces few‑shot exemplars by an average of 65.3% in character count while maintaining full propositional output fidelity, revealing that models tend to keep logical identifiers and constraint declarations while discarding natural language prose. The analysis further distinguishes between universal encoder and decoder models, offering insights into prompt compression and structural analysis.
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:2607. 08399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models process prompts by propagating activations through dozens of layers before generating a response.
SCOPE is a training‑free generative prompt‑compression framework that reduces LLM input length by chunking a prompt into semantically coherent segments, rewriting each chunk to be more concise, and then reconstructing a coherent prompt. Unlike token‑removal methods, SCOPE’s chunk‑level rewriting preserves critical information and text coherence, and includes optimization techniques for finer‑grained control of compression ratios. Extensive evaluations on question‑answering and summarization tasks show that SCOPE consistently outperforms selective compression baselines, especially at high compression ratios.
The paper introduces a fine-grained method called interactions to analyze prompt sensitivity in large language models (LLMs). By decomposing output scores into nonlinear interactions, the authors show that subtle prompt changes can destabilize these interactions even when overall outputs stay unchanged. They propose an Interaction-based Prompt Sensitivity (IPS) metric and use it to evaluate 50 open-source LLMs, finding that supervised fine‑tuning, larger model scales, dense architectures, and few‑shot learning all reduce prompt sensitivity, primarily by stabilizing low‑order interactions.
arXiv:2608.21074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in research workflows and software development pipelines, yet their output remains sensitive to in...
arXiv:2609.13154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made prompts increasingly large and complex. Techniques such as chain-of-thought reasoning (Wei et...
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.
The paper presents a prompt-based method for minimal-edit grammatical error correction (GEC) that reduces overcorrection in large language models (LLMs). It introduces taxonomy-based instructions, batch prompting to regularize overcorrection, and LLM-assisted prompt optimization, achieving an $F_{0.5}$ score of 78.32 on BEA-2019 with Gemini 3.1-Pro. This approach narrows the performance gap to fine-tuned models while avoiding their infrastructure demands.
arXiv:2607. 22683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the unprecedented success of Language Models (LMs), the science of Prompt Engineering has evolved the powerful idea of Prompt Programming, where prompts are treated as a programmable control surface for describing complex tasks and leveraging LM capabilities.
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.