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Main Authors: Guan, Haoxiang, He, Jiyan, Zheng, Shuxin, Chen, En-Hong, Zhang, Weiming, Yu, Nenghai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18252
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author Guan, Haoxiang
He, Jiyan
Zheng, Shuxin
Chen, En-Hong
Zhang, Weiming
Yu, Nenghai
author_facet Guan, Haoxiang
He, Jiyan
Zheng, Shuxin
Chen, En-Hong
Zhang, Weiming
Yu, Nenghai
contents Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on many tasks. However, to achieve optimal performance, specially designed prompting methods are still needed. These methods either rely on task-specific few-shot examples that require a certain level of domain knowledge, or are designed to be simple but only perform well on a few types of tasks. In this work, we attempt to introduce the concept of generalist prompting, which operates on the design principle of achieving optimal or near-optimal performance on a wide range of tasks while eliminating the need for manual selection and customization of prompts tailored to specific problems. Furthermore, we propose MeMo (Mental Models), an innovative prompting method that is simple-designed yet effectively fulfills the criteria of generalist prompting. MeMo distills the cores of various prompting methods into individual mental models and allows LLMs to autonomously select the most suitable mental models for the problem, achieving or being near to the state-of-the-art results on diverse tasks such as STEM, logical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning in zero-shot settings. We hope that the insights presented herein will stimulate further exploration of generalist prompting methods for LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_18252
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Generalist Prompting for Large Language Models by Mental Models
Guan, Haoxiang
He, Jiyan
Zheng, Shuxin
Chen, En-Hong
Zhang, Weiming
Yu, Nenghai
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on many tasks. However, to achieve optimal performance, specially designed prompting methods are still needed. These methods either rely on task-specific few-shot examples that require a certain level of domain knowledge, or are designed to be simple but only perform well on a few types of tasks. In this work, we attempt to introduce the concept of generalist prompting, which operates on the design principle of achieving optimal or near-optimal performance on a wide range of tasks while eliminating the need for manual selection and customization of prompts tailored to specific problems. Furthermore, we propose MeMo (Mental Models), an innovative prompting method that is simple-designed yet effectively fulfills the criteria of generalist prompting. MeMo distills the cores of various prompting methods into individual mental models and allows LLMs to autonomously select the most suitable mental models for the problem, achieving or being near to the state-of-the-art results on diverse tasks such as STEM, logical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning in zero-shot settings. We hope that the insights presented herein will stimulate further exploration of generalist prompting methods for LLMs.
title Towards Generalist Prompting for Large Language Models by Mental Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18252