Think Earlier, Not Longer: Prompt Optimization via Reducing Unhealthy Exploration (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve reasoning performance ignore the presence of unhealthy exploration that increases token usage without contributing to effective problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-dynamics-aware prompt optimization framework that trains a lightweight optimizer to generate concise clarifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces ambiguity-induced early-stage uncertainty while preserving the model's reasoning capabilities. |
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