arXiv AI

Scaling Textual Gradients via Sampling-Based Momentum

arXiv:2506. 00400v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based prompt optimization, which uses LLM-provided ``textual gradients'' (feedback) to refine prompts, has emerged as an effective method for automatic prompt engineering.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Prompt-Robust Language Models: Which Training Strategies Work?

The paper investigates how different training strategies affect the prompt sensitivity of large language models. It reproduces and compares methods such as refined data construction and robustness objectives, finding that while robustness fine‑tuning improves over standard fine‑tuning and in‑context learning, the prompt gap remains large (40–57%). Notably, newer techniques like CoIN and PPCL often underperform a simple data‑construction approach that uses one template per batch, and diagnostics suggest that mixed‑template batches force the optimizer to reconcile conflicting updates rather than learn a prompt‑agnostic representation.

By Frederic Sadrieh, Michal \v{S}tef\'anik
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Learning a Single Token to Replace Long System Prompts in LLMs

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...

By Jiancheng Dong, Pengyue Jia, Jingyu Peng, Maolin Wang, Yuhao Wang, Lixin Su, Xin Sun, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xiangyu Zhao
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Efficiently Estimating Optimal Hyperparameter Scaling Laws through Power-Law Entropy Search

The paper introduces Power‑Law Entropy Search (PLES), a computational‑cost‑aware acquisition function that uses multi‑fidelity Bayesian optimization to efficiently estimate optimal hyperparameter scaling laws for large language model training. PLES focuses on reducing the overall uncertainty of scaling law estimates rather than optimizing a single objective, selecting configurations that maximize uncertainty reduction per unit computational cost. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, surrogate models, and real LLM pre‑training runs show that PLES converges to accurate scaling laws using less than one‑tenth of the computational budget required by conventional grid search and other baselines.

By Zhiliang Chen, Sebastian Ament, David Eriksson, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy, Jihao Andreas Lin
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Memory-Efficient LLM Training with Dynamic Sparsity: From Stability to Practical Scaling

arXiv:2606. 00888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) offers a promising paradigm for improving the training and inference efficiency of deep neural networks; however, we find that in large language model training, DST can suffer from optimization instability, manifested as loss spikes after topology updates.

By Qiao Xiao, Boqian Wu, Patrik Okanovic, Tomasz Sternal, Maurice van Keulen, Elena Mocanu, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Decebal Constantin Mocanu, Torsten Hoefler