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Main Authors: Spliethöver, Maximilian, Knebler, Tim, Fumagalli, Fabian, Muschalik, Maximilian, Hammer, Barbara, Hüllermeier, Eyke, Wachsmuth, Henning
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06487
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author Spliethöver, Maximilian
Knebler, Tim
Fumagalli, Fabian
Muschalik, Maximilian
Hammer, Barbara
Hüllermeier, Eyke
Wachsmuth, Henning
author_facet Spliethöver, Maximilian
Knebler, Tim
Fumagalli, Fabian
Muschalik, Maximilian
Hammer, Barbara
Hüllermeier, Eyke
Wachsmuth, Henning
contents Recent advances on instruction fine-tuning have led to the development of various prompting techniques for large language models, such as explicit reasoning steps. However, the success of techniques depends on various parameters, such as the task, language model, and context provided. Finding an effective prompt is, therefore, often a trial-and-error process. Most existing approaches to automatic prompting aim to optimize individual techniques instead of compositions of techniques and their dependence on the input. To fill this gap, we propose an adaptive prompting approach that predicts the optimal prompt composition ad-hoc for a given input. We apply our approach to social bias detection, a highly context-dependent task that requires semantic understanding. We evaluate it with three large language models on three datasets, comparing compositions to individual techniques and other baselines. The results underline the importance of finding an effective prompt composition. Our approach robustly ensures high detection performance, and is best in several settings. Moreover, first experiments on other tasks support its generalizability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_06487
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive Prompting: Ad-hoc Prompt Composition for Social Bias Detection
Spliethöver, Maximilian
Knebler, Tim
Fumagalli, Fabian
Muschalik, Maximilian
Hammer, Barbara
Hüllermeier, Eyke
Wachsmuth, Henning
Computation and Language
Recent advances on instruction fine-tuning have led to the development of various prompting techniques for large language models, such as explicit reasoning steps. However, the success of techniques depends on various parameters, such as the task, language model, and context provided. Finding an effective prompt is, therefore, often a trial-and-error process. Most existing approaches to automatic prompting aim to optimize individual techniques instead of compositions of techniques and their dependence on the input. To fill this gap, we propose an adaptive prompting approach that predicts the optimal prompt composition ad-hoc for a given input. We apply our approach to social bias detection, a highly context-dependent task that requires semantic understanding. We evaluate it with three large language models on three datasets, comparing compositions to individual techniques and other baselines. The results underline the importance of finding an effective prompt composition. Our approach robustly ensures high detection performance, and is best in several settings. Moreover, first experiments on other tasks support its generalizability.
title Adaptive Prompting: Ad-hoc Prompt Composition for Social Bias Detection
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06487