PromptWizard: Task-Aware Prompt Optimization Framework
Keywords: Prompt optimization, LLMs, task-aware
TL;DR: PromptWizard is an automated framework for creating and refining prompts for large language models. It optimizes instructions and examples iteratively, improving efficiency and performance across various tasks and datasets.
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed AI across diverse domains, with \textit{prompting} being central to their success in guiding model outputs. However, manual prompt engineering is both labor-intensive and domain-specific, necessitating the need for automated solutions. We introduce PromptWizard, a novel, fully automated framework for discrete prompt optimization, utilizing a self-evolving, self-adapting mechanism. Through a feedback-driven critique and synthesis process, PromptWizard achieves an effective balance between exploration and exploitation, iteratively refining both prompt instructions and in-context examples to generate human-readable, task-specific prompts. This guided approach systematically improves prompt quality, resulting in superior performance across 45 tasks. PromptWizard excels even with limited training data, smaller LLMs, and various LLM architectures. Additionally, our cost analysis reveals a substantial reduction in API calls, token usage, and overall cost, demonstrating PromptWizard's efficiency, scalability, and advantages over existing prompt optimization strategies.
Supplementary Material: zip
Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
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Submission Number: 13599
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