arXiv AI
Failure-Guided Co-Evolution of Prompts and Training Data
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arXiv AI
Aug 24
Beyond Prompt Engineering: A Systematic Analysis of Prompt Lexical Sensitivity and Its Impacts on Quality
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 AI
Jun 11
APEX: Automated Prompt Engineering eXpert with Dynamic Data Selection
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.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 24
Stabilizing Black-Box Prompt Optimization with Textual Regularization and Signal Aggregation
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.
arXiv AI
Jun 9
Knowing How to Edit: Reliable Evaluation Signals for Diagnosing and Optimizing Prompts at Query Level
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.
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.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28
$p1$: Better Prompt Optimization with Fewer Prompts
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.