$p1$: Better Prompt Optimization with Fewer Prompts
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
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. 14105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For Large Language Models to reliably answer user queries, users must clearly specify requirements, context, and constraints.
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.
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.
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: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.