CoolPrompt: An Automatic Prompt Optimization Framework for Large Language Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19102 Authors

Keywords: AutoPrompting, LLM, NLP, prompt engineering, prompt optimization

Abstract: The effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) is highly dependent on the design of input prompts. Manual prompt engineering requires a domain expertise and prompting techniques knowledge that leads to a complex, time-consuming, subjective, and often suboptimal process. We introduce CoolPrompt as a novel framework for automatic prompt optimization. It provides a complete zero-configuration workflow, which includes automatic task and metric selection, also splits the input dataset or generates synthetic data when annotations are missing, and final feedback collection of prompt optimization results. Our framework provides three new prompt optimization algorithms ReflectivePrompt and DistillPrompt that have demonstrated effectiveness compared to similar optimization algorithms, and a flexible meta-prompting approach called HyPE for rapid optimization. Competitive and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CoolPrompt over other solutions.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 19102