Automatic Prompt Optimization with “Gradient Descent” and Beam Search (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance as general purpose agents, but their abilities remain highly dependent on prompts which are hand written with onerous trial-and-error effort. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that uses numerical gradient descent to automatically improve prompts by rewriting vague task descriptions into more precise annotation instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms previous methods and improves performance on three benchmark NLP tasks and the novel problem of LLM jailbreak detection. |
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| Challenge: | Suboptimal prompts can introduce biases, inconsistencies, and unreliable evaluations. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automatic prompt optimization face two challenges: lack of diversity and semantic drift. |
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