Adaptive Prompt Optimization for Open-Ended Tasks: Uncertainty Preference as a Secondary Signal (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent training-free prompt optimizers treat performance as maximizing a single scalar score and ignore a second signal that the desired style is task dependent. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-entropy-based method that uses task uncertainty to guide prompt optimization by selecting high-entropicy candidates for creative tasks and low-energetic candidates for conservative ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on MT-Bench subsets and integrates easily into existing prompt optimizers. |
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt optimization methods have found effective prompts, but they often differ from sophisticated prompts carefully designed by human experts. |
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance with dedicated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts. |
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