Prompt Engineering a Prompt Engineer

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ye, Qinyuan, Axmed, Maxamed, Pryzant, Reid, Khani, Fereshte
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Ye, Qinyuan
Axmed, Maxamed
Pryzant, Reid
Khani, Fereshte
author_facet Ye, Qinyuan
Axmed, Maxamed
Pryzant, Reid
Khani, Fereshte
contents Prompt engineering is a challenging yet crucial task for optimizing the performance of large language models on customized tasks. It requires complex reasoning to examine the model's errors, hypothesize what is missing or misleading in the current prompt, and communicate the task with clarity. While recent works indicate that large language models can be meta-prompted to perform automatic prompt engineering, we argue that their potential is limited due to insufficient guidance for complex reasoning in the meta-prompt. We fill this gap by infusing into the meta-prompt three key components: detailed descriptions, context specification, and a step-by-step reasoning template. The resulting method, named PE2, exhibits remarkable versatility across diverse language tasks. It finds prompts that outperform "let's think step by step" by 6.3% on MultiArith and 3.1% on GSM8K, and outperforms competitive baselines on counterfactual tasks by 6.9%. Further, we show that PE2 can make targeted and highly specific prompt edits, rectify erroneous prompts, and induce multi-step plans for complex tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_05661
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prompt Engineering a Prompt Engineer
Ye, Qinyuan
Axmed, Maxamed
Pryzant, Reid
Khani, Fereshte
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Prompt engineering is a challenging yet crucial task for optimizing the performance of large language models on customized tasks. It requires complex reasoning to examine the model's errors, hypothesize what is missing or misleading in the current prompt, and communicate the task with clarity. While recent works indicate that large language models can be meta-prompted to perform automatic prompt engineering, we argue that their potential is limited due to insufficient guidance for complex reasoning in the meta-prompt. We fill this gap by infusing into the meta-prompt three key components: detailed descriptions, context specification, and a step-by-step reasoning template. The resulting method, named PE2, exhibits remarkable versatility across diverse language tasks. It finds prompts that outperform "let's think step by step" by 6.3% on MultiArith and 3.1% on GSM8K, and outperforms competitive baselines on counterfactual tasks by 6.9%. Further, we show that PE2 can make targeted and highly specific prompt edits, rectify erroneous prompts, and induce multi-step plans for complex tasks.
title Prompt Engineering a Prompt Engineer
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05661