Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance as general purpose agents, but their abilities remain highly dependent on prompts which are hand written with onerous trial-and-error effort. We propose a simple and nonparametric solution to this problem, Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO), which is inspired by numerical gradient descent to automatically improve prompts, assuming access to training data and an LLM API. The algorithm uses minibatches of data to form natural language "gradients" that criticize the current prompt. The gradients are then "propagated" into the prompt by editing the prompt in the opposite semantic direction of the gradient. These gradient descent steps are guided by a beam search and bandit selection procedure which significantly improves algorithmic efficiency. Preliminary results across three benchmark NLP tasks and the novel problem of LLM jailbreak detection suggest that Automatic Prompt Optimization can outperform prior prompt editing techniques and improve an initial prompt's performance by up to 31%, by using data to rewrite vague task descriptions into more precise annotation instructions.
New York University（纽约大学）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Prompt-based learning (i.e., prompting) is an emerging paradigm for exploiting knowledge learned by a pretrained language model. In this paper, we propose Automatic Multi-Label Prompting (AMuLaP), a simple yet effective method to automatically select label mappings for few-shot text classification with prompting. Our method exploits one-to-many label mappings and a statistics-based algorithm to select label mappings given a prompt template. Our experiments demonstrate that AMuLaP achieves competitive performance on the GLUE benchmark without human effort or external resources.
Cracow University of Technology（克拉科夫理工大学）；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）
In this paper, we propose a simple, fast and easy to implement algorithm LOSSGRAD (locally optimal step-size in gradient descent), which automatically modifies the step-size in gradient descent during neural networks training. Given a function $f$, a point $x$, and the gradient $\nabla_x f$ of $f$, we aim to find the step-size $h$ which is (locally) optimal, i.e. satisfies: $$ h=arg\,min_{t \geq 0} f(x-t \nabla_x f). $$ Making use of quadratic approximation, we show that the algorithm satisfies the above assumption. We experimentally show that our method is insensitive to the choice of initial…
IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）；IBM T. J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
Evolutionary stochastic gradient descent (ESGD) was proposed as a population-based approach that combines the merits of gradient-aware and gradient-free optimization algorithms for superior overall optimization performance. In this paper we investigate a variant of ESGD for optimization of acoustic models for automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this variant, we assume the existence of a well-trained acoustic model and use it as an anchor in the parent population whose good "gene" will propagate in the evolution to the offsprings. We propose an ESGD algorithm leveraging the anchor models suc…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods are prominent for training machine learning and deep learning models. The performance of these techniques depends on their hyperparameter tuning over time and varies for different models and problems. Manual adjustment of hyperparameters is very costly and time-consuming, and even if done correctly, it lacks theoretical justification which inevitably leads to "rule of thumb" settings. In this paper, we propose a generic approach that utilizes the statistics of an unbiased gradient estimator to automatically and simultaneously adjust two paramount hyper…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（矢量研究所）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
By conditioning on natural language instructions, large language models (LLMs) have displayed impressive capabilities as general-purpose computers. However, task performance depends significantly on the quality of the prompt used to steer the model, and most effective prompts have been handcrafted by humans. Inspired by classical program synthesis and the human approach to prompt engineering, we propose Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE) for automatic instruction generation and selection. In our method, we treat the instruction as the "program," optimized by searching over a pool of instruction c…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）
Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning by generating intermediate reasoning steps. Providing these steps for prompting demonstrations is called chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. CoT prompting has two major paradigms. One leverages a simple prompt like "Let's think step by step" to facilitate step-by-step thinking before answering a question. The other uses a few manual demonstrations one by one, each composed of a question and a reasoning chain that leads to an answer. The superior performance of the second paradigm hinges on the hand-crafting of task-specific demonstration…
Many machine learning models require a training procedure based on running stochastic gradient descent. A key element for the efficiency of those algorithms is the choice of the learning rate schedule. While finding good learning rates schedules using Bayesian optimisation has been tackled by several authors, adapting it dynamically in a data-driven way is an open question. This is of high practical importance to users that need to train a single, expensive model. To tackle this problem, we introduce an original probabilistic model for traces of optimisers, based on latent Gaussian processes a…
Experience-Guided Reflective Co-Evolution of Prompts and Heuristics for Automatic Algorithm Design
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学北京校区人工智能学院）；Department of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学数据科学系）；School of Information, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学信息学院）；WeChat, Tencent（微信，腾讯）
The objective of this research is to enhance performance of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm in text classification. In our research, we proposed using SGD learning with Grid-Search approach to fine-tuning hyper-parameters in order to enhance the performance of SGD classification. We explored different settings for representation, transformation and weighting features from the summary description of terrorist attacks incidents obtained from the Global Terrorism Database as a pre-classification step, and validated SGD learning on Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression and …
Institute of Software, CAS（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Microsoft（微软公司）；Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；Institute of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Fudan University（复旦大学现代语言与语言学研究所）
An automatically discovered chain-of-thought prompt generalizes to novel models and datasets
Medical University of Vienna（维也纳医科大学）；Johannes Kepler University Linz（林茨约翰内斯·开普勒大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；Humboldt University Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）
