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Main Authors: Liu, Yuchi, Singh, Jaskirat, Liu, Gaowen, Payani, Ali, Zheng, Liang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20252
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author Liu, Yuchi
Singh, Jaskirat
Liu, Gaowen
Payani, Ali
Zheng, Liang
author_facet Liu, Yuchi
Singh, Jaskirat
Liu, Gaowen
Payani, Ali
Zheng, Liang
contents Large language models (LLMs) have shown great progress in responding to user questions, allowing for a multitude of diverse applications. Yet, the quality of LLM outputs heavily depends on the prompt design, where a good prompt might enable the LLM to answer a very challenging question correctly. Therefore, recent works have developed many strategies for improving the prompt, including both manual crafting and in-domain optimization. However, their efficacy in unrestricted scenarios remains questionable, as the former depends on human design for specific questions and the latter usually generalizes poorly to unseen scenarios. To address these problems, we give LLMs the freedom to design the best prompts according to themselves. Specifically, we include a hierarchy of LLMs, first constructing a prompt with precise instructions and accurate wording in a hierarchical manner, and then using this prompt to generate the final answer to the user query. We term this pipeline Hierarchical Multi-Agent Workflow, or HMAW. In contrast with prior works, HMAW imposes no human restriction and requires no training, and is completely task-agnostic while capable of adjusting to the nuances of the underlying task. Through both quantitative and qualitative experiments across multiple benchmarks, we verify that despite its simplicity, the proposed approach can create detailed and suitable prompts, further boosting the performance of current LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_20252
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Hierarchical Multi-Agent Workflows for Zero-Shot Prompt Optimization
Liu, Yuchi
Singh, Jaskirat
Liu, Gaowen
Payani, Ali
Zheng, Liang
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great progress in responding to user questions, allowing for a multitude of diverse applications. Yet, the quality of LLM outputs heavily depends on the prompt design, where a good prompt might enable the LLM to answer a very challenging question correctly. Therefore, recent works have developed many strategies for improving the prompt, including both manual crafting and in-domain optimization. However, their efficacy in unrestricted scenarios remains questionable, as the former depends on human design for specific questions and the latter usually generalizes poorly to unseen scenarios. To address these problems, we give LLMs the freedom to design the best prompts according to themselves. Specifically, we include a hierarchy of LLMs, first constructing a prompt with precise instructions and accurate wording in a hierarchical manner, and then using this prompt to generate the final answer to the user query. We term this pipeline Hierarchical Multi-Agent Workflow, or HMAW. In contrast with prior works, HMAW imposes no human restriction and requires no training, and is completely task-agnostic while capable of adjusting to the nuances of the underlying task. Through both quantitative and qualitative experiments across multiple benchmarks, we verify that despite its simplicity, the proposed approach can create detailed and suitable prompts, further boosting the performance of current LLMs.
title Towards Hierarchical Multi-Agent Workflows for Zero-Shot Prompt Optimization
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20252