arXiv:2607. 14105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For Large Language Models to reliably answer user queries, users must clearly specify requirements, context, and constraints.
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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.
The paper introduces OR‑Clarify, a benchmark that tests whether large language models can identify missing elements in natural‑language optimization requests before formulating a mathematical model. Each task provides a partial problem description and hides structured slots; agents interact with a simulated user to recover these slots, with metrics for accuracy, stopping decisions, and interaction cost. The authors also propose InterOPT, a two‑stage framework that detects unresolved gaps and decides whether to ask further questions or stop, achieving superior slot recovery in choice‑based experiments and competitive performance in open‑ended settings.
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:2609.39927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompt optimization improves the performance of language-model systems on downstream tasks by refining their prompts. Classical methods evaluate prompt...
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.
Prompt2Skill is an unsupervised framework that constructs skills for Large Language Models directly from natural‑language task descriptions. It automatically derives task specifications, discovers or synthesizes datasets, and refines the skill through a reflective editing loop. In experiments across question answering, reading comprehension, spreadsheet manipulation, and mathematical reasoning, Prompt2Skill outperforms direct prompting, improving performance by an average of 10.8 points on both open‑source and frontier models.