Daily Papers

In this work, we propose a training-free method to inject visual prompts into Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) through test-time optimization of a learnable latent variable. We observe that attention, as the core module of MLLMs, connects text prompt tokens and visual tokens, ultimately determining the final results. Our approach involves adjusting visual tokens from the MLP output at test time, controlling the attention response to ensure text prompt tokens attend to visual tokens in referring regions. We optimize a learnable latent variable based on an energy function, enhancing the strength of referring regions in the attention map. This enables detailed region description and reasoning without the need for substantial training costs or model retraining. Our method offers a promising direction for integrating referring abilities into MLLMs, and supports referring with box, mask, scribble and point. The results demonstrate that our method exhibits out-of-domain generalization and interpretability.

Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) is an effective tuning method for adapting pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) to downstream tasks. It leverages extra learnable tokens, known as prompts, which steer the frozen pretrained ViTs. Although VPT has demonstrated its applicability with supervised vision transformers, it often underperforms with self-supervised ones. Through empirical observations, we deduce that the effectiveness of VPT hinges largely on the ViT blocks with which the prompt tokens interact. Specifically, VPT shows improved performance on image classification tasks for MAE and MoCo v3 when the prompt tokens are inserted into later blocks rather than the first block. These observations suggest that there exists an optimal location of blocks for the insertion of prompt tokens. Unfortunately, identifying the optimal blocks for prompts within each self-supervised ViT for diverse future scenarios is a costly process. To mitigate this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method that learns a gate for each ViT block to adjust its intervention into the prompt tokens. With our method, prompt tokens are selectively influenced by blocks that require steering for task adaptation. Our method outperforms VPT variants in FGVC and VTAB image classification and ADE20K semantic segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/ryongithub/GatedPromptTuning.

Prompt tuning (PT), where a small amount of trainable soft (continuous) prompt vectors is affixed to the input of language models (LM), has shown promising results across various tasks and models for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). PT stands out from other PEFT approaches because it maintains competitive performance with fewer trainable parameters and does not drastically scale up its parameters as the model size expands. However, PT introduces additional soft prompt tokens, leading to longer input sequences, which significantly impacts training and inference time and memory usage due to the Transformer's quadratic complexity. Particularly concerning for Large Language Models (LLMs) that face heavy daily querying. To address this issue, we propose Decomposed Prompt Tuning (DePT), which decomposes the soft prompt into a shorter soft prompt and a pair of low-rank matrices that are then optimised with two different learning rates. This allows DePT to achieve better performance while saving over 20% memory and time costs compared to vanilla PT and its variants, without changing trainable parameter sizes. Through extensive experiments on 23 natural language processing (NLP) and vision-language (VL) tasks, we demonstrate that DePT outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT approaches, including the full fine-tuning baseline in some scenarios. Additionally, we empirically show that DEPT grows more efficient as the model size increases. Our further study reveals that DePT integrates seamlessly with parameter-efficient transfer learning in the few-shot learning setting and highlights its adaptability to various model architectures and sizes.

Prompt tuning with large-scale pretrained vision-language models empowers open-vocabulary predictions trained on limited base categories, e.g., object classification and detection. In this paper, we propose compositional prompt tuning with motion cues: an extended prompt tuning paradigm for compositional predictions of video data. In particular, we present Relation Prompt (RePro) for Open-vocabulary Video Visual Relation Detection (Open-VidVRD), where conventional prompt tuning is easily biased to certain subject-object combinations and motion patterns. To this end, RePro addresses the two technical challenges of Open-VidVRD: 1) the prompt tokens should respect the two different semantic roles of subject and object, and 2) the tuning should account for the diverse spatio-temporal motion patterns of the subject-object compositions. Without bells and whistles, our RePro achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on two VidVRD benchmarks of not only the base training object and predicate categories, but also the unseen ones. Extensive ablations also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed compositional and multi-mode design of prompts. Code is available at https://github.com/Dawn-LX/OpenVoc-VidVRD.

Prompt tuning is a parameter-efficient way to deploy large-scale pre-trained models to downstream tasks by adding task-specific tokens. In terms of vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models, prompt tuning often requires a large number of learnable tokens to bridge the gap between the pre-training and downstream tasks, which greatly exacerbates the already high computational overhead. In this paper, we revisit the principle of prompt tuning for Transformer-based VLP models, and reveal that the impact of soft prompt tokens can be actually approximated via independent information diffusion steps, thereby avoiding the expensive global attention modeling and reducing the computational complexity to a large extent. Based on this finding, we propose a novel Approximated Prompt Tuning (APT) approach towards efficient VL transfer learning. To validate APT, we apply it to two representative VLP models, namely ViLT and METER, and conduct extensive experiments on a bunch of downstream tasks. Meanwhile, the generalization of APT is also validated on CLIP for image classification and StableDiffusion for text-to-image generation. The experimental results not only show the superior performance gains and computation efficiency of APT against the conventional prompt tuning methods, e.g., +7.01% accuracy and -82.30% additional computation overhead on METER, but also confirm its merits over other parameter-efficient transfer learning approaches.

Prompt tuning learns soft prompts to condition frozen Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. While prompt tuning has gradually reached the performance level of fine-tuning as the model scale increases, there is still a large performance gap between prompt tuning and fine-tuning for models of moderate and small scales (typically less than 11B parameters). In this paper, we empirically show that the trained prompt tokens can have a negative impact on a downstream task and thus degrade its performance. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel Prompt tuning model with an eXtremely small scale (XPrompt) under the regime of lottery tickets hypothesis. Specifically, XPrompt eliminates the negative prompt tokens at different granularity levels through a hierarchical structured pruning, yielding a more parameter-efficient prompt yet with a competitive performance. Comprehensive experiments are carried out on SuperGLUE tasks, and the extensive results indicate that XPrompt is able to close the performance gap at smaller model scales.

Large-scale foundation models like CLIP have shown strong zero-shot generalization but struggle with domain shifts, limiting their adaptability. In our work, we introduce StyLIP, a novel domain-agnostic prompt learning strategy for Domain Generalization (DG). StyLIP disentangles visual style and content in CLIP`s vision encoder by using style projectors to learn domain-specific prompt tokens and combining them with content features. Trained contrastively, this approach enables seamless adaptation across domains, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on multiple DG benchmarks. Additionally, we propose AD-CLIP for unsupervised domain adaptation (DA), leveraging CLIP`s frozen vision backbone to learn domain-invariant prompts through image style and content features. By aligning domains in embedding space with entropy minimization, AD-CLIP effectively handles domain shifts, even when only target domain samples are available. Lastly, we outline future work on class discovery using prompt learning for semantic segmentation in remote sensing, focusing on identifying novel or rare classes in unstructured environments. This paves the way for more adaptive and generalizable models in complex, real-world scenarios.

Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) have expanded their potential for real-world applications, enabling these models to perform complex reasoning on images. In the widely used fully autoregressive transformer-based models like LLaVA, projected visual tokens are prepended to textual tokens. Oftentimes, visual tokens are significantly more than prompt tokens, resulting in increased computational overhead during both training and inference. In this paper, we propose Visual Compact Token Registers (Victor), a method that reduces the number of visual tokens by summarizing them into a smaller set of register tokens. Victor adds a few learnable register tokens after the visual tokens and summarizes the visual information into these registers using the first few layers in the language tower of VLMs. After these few layers, all visual tokens are discarded, significantly improving computational efficiency for both training and inference. Notably, our method is easy to implement and requires a small number of new trainable parameters with minimal impact on model performance. In our experiment, with merely 8 visual registers--about 1% of the original tokens--Victor shows less than a 4% accuracy drop while reducing the total training time by 43% and boosting the inference throughput by 3.3X.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has revolutionized numerous fields, yet its integration with graph data, a cornerstone in our interconnected world, remains nascent. This paper presents a pioneering survey on the emerging domain of graph prompts in AGI, addressing key challenges and opportunities in harnessing graph data for AGI applications. Despite substantial advancements in AGI across natural language processing and computer vision, the application to graph data is relatively underexplored. This survey critically evaluates the current landscape of AGI in handling graph data, highlighting the distinct challenges in cross-modality, cross-domain, and cross-task applications specific to graphs. Our work is the first to propose a unified framework for understanding graph prompt learning, offering clarity on prompt tokens, token structures, and insertion patterns in the graph domain. We delve into the intrinsic properties of graph prompts, exploring their flexibility, expressiveness, and interplay with existing graph models. A comprehensive taxonomy categorizes over 100 works in this field, aligning them with pre-training tasks across node-level, edge-level, and graph-level objectives. Additionally, we present, ProG, a Python library, and an accompanying website, to support and advance research in graph prompting. The survey culminates in a discussion of current challenges and future directions, offering a roadmap for research in graph prompting within AGI. Through this comprehensive analysis, we aim to catalyze further exploration and practical applications of AGI in graph data, underlining its potential to reshape AGI fields and beyond. ProG and the website can be accessed by https://github.com/WxxShirley/Awesome-Graph-Prompt, and https://github.com/sheldonresearch/ProG, respectively.

The size of vision models has grown exponentially over the last few years, especially after the emergence of Vision Transformer. This has motivated the development of parameter-efficient tuning methods, such as learning adapter layers or visual prompt tokens, which allow a tiny portion of model parameters to be trained whereas the vast majority obtained from pre-training are frozen. However, designing a proper tuning method is non-trivial: one might need to try out a lengthy list of design choices, not to mention that each downstream dataset often requires custom designs. In this paper, we view the existing parameter-efficient tuning methods as "prompt modules" and propose Neural prOmpt seArcH (NOAH), a novel approach that learns, for large vision models, the optimal design of prompt modules through a neural architecture search algorithm, specifically for each downstream dataset. By conducting extensive experiments on over 20 vision datasets, we demonstrate that NOAH (i) is superior to individual prompt modules, (ii) has a good few-shot learning ability, and (iii) is domain-generalizable. The code and models are available at https://github.com/Davidzhangyuanhan/NOAH.

Soft prompt tuning achieves superior performances across a wide range of few-shot tasks. However, the performances of prompt tuning can be highly sensitive to the initialization of the prompts. We also empirically observe that conventional prompt tuning methods cannot encode and learn sufficient task-relevant information from prompt tokens. In this work, we develop an information-theoretic framework that formulates soft prompt tuning as maximizing mutual information between prompts and other model parameters (or encoded representations). This novel view helps us to develop a more efficient, accurate and robust soft prompt tuning method InfoPrompt. With this framework, we develop two novel mutual information based loss functions, to (i) discover proper prompt initialization for the downstream tasks and learn sufficient task-relevant information from prompt tokens and (ii) encourage the output representation from the pretrained language model to be more aware of the task-relevant information captured in the learnt prompt. Extensive experiments validate that InfoPrompt can significantly accelerate the convergence of the prompt tuning and outperform traditional prompt tuning methods. Finally, we provide a formal theoretical result for showing to show that gradient descent type algorithm can be used to train our mutual information loss.

Prompt tuning is a promising method to fine-tune a pre-trained language model without retraining its large-scale parameters. Instead, it attaches a soft prompt to the input text, whereby downstream tasks can be well adapted by merely learning the embeddings of prompt tokens. Nevertheless, existing methods still suffer from two challenges: (i) they are hard to balance accuracy and efficiency. A longer (shorter) soft prompt generally leads to a better(worse) accuracy but at the cost of more (less) training time. (ii)The performance may not be consistent when adapting to different downstream tasks. We attribute it to the same embedding space but responsible for different requirements of downstream tasks. To address these issues, we propose an Efficient Prompt Tuning method (EPT) by multi-space projection and prompt fusion. Specifically, it decomposes a given soft prompt into a shorter prompt and two low-rank matrices, significantly reducing the training time. Accuracy is also enhanced by leveraging low-rank matrices and the short prompt as additional knowledge sources to enrich the semantics of the original short prompt. In addition, we project the soft prompt into multiple subspaces to improve the performance consistency, and then adaptively learn the combination weights of different spaces through a gating network. Experiments on 13 natural language processing downstream tasks show that our method significantly and consistently outperforms 11 comparison methods with the relative percentage of improvements up to 12.9%, and training time decreased by 14%.

Pre-trained point cloud models have found extensive applications in 3D understanding tasks like object classification and part segmentation. However, the prevailing strategy of full fine-tuning in downstream tasks leads to large per-task storage overhead for model parameters, which limits the efficiency when applying large-scale pre-trained models. Inspired by the recent success of visual prompt tuning (VPT), this paper attempts to explore prompt tuning on pre-trained point cloud models, to pursue an elegant balance between performance and parameter efficiency. We find while instance-agnostic static prompting, e.g. VPT, shows some efficacy in downstream transfer, it is vulnerable to the distribution diversity caused by various types of noises in real-world point cloud data. To conquer this limitation, we propose a novel Instance-aware Dynamic Prompt Tuning (IDPT) strategy for pre-trained point cloud models. The essence of IDPT is to develop a dynamic prompt generation module to perceive semantic prior features of each point cloud instance and generate adaptive prompt tokens to enhance the model's robustness. Notably, extensive experiments demonstrate that IDPT outperforms full fine-tuning in most tasks with a mere 7% of the trainable parameters, providing a promising solution to parameter-efficient learning for pre-trained point cloud models. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/ICCV23-IDPT.

Prompt tuning, a recently emerging paradigm, enables the powerful vision-language pre-training models to adapt to downstream tasks in a parameter -- and data -- efficient way, by learning the ``soft prompts'' to condition frozen pre-training models. Though effective, it is particularly problematic in the few-shot scenario, where prompt tuning performance is sensitive to the initialization and requires a time-consuming process to find a good initialization, thus restricting the fast adaptation ability of the pre-training models. In addition, prompt tuning could undermine the generalizability of the pre-training models, because the learnable prompt tokens are easy to overfit to the limited training samples. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Gradient-RegulAted Meta-prompt learning (GRAM) framework that jointly meta-learns an efficient soft prompt initialization for better adaptation and a lightweight gradient regulating function for strong cross-domain generalizability in a meta-learning paradigm using only the unlabeled image-text pre-training data. Rather than designing a specific prompt tuning method, our GRAM can be easily incorporated into various prompt tuning methods in a model-agnostic way, and comprehensive experiments show that GRAM brings about consistent improvement for them in several settings (i.e., few-shot learning, cross-domain generalization, cross-dataset generalization, etc.) over 11 datasets. Further, experiments show that GRAM enables the orthogonal methods of textual and visual prompt tuning to work in a mutually-enhanced way, offering better generalizability beyond the uni-modal prompt tuning methods.

Although deep learning models have shown impressive performance on supervised learning tasks, they often struggle to generalize well when the training (source) and test (target) domains differ. Unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) has emerged as a popular solution to this problem. However, current DA techniques rely on visual backbones, which may lack semantic richness. Despite the potential of large-scale vision-language foundation models like CLIP, their effectiveness for DA has yet to be fully explored. To address this gap, we introduce AD-CLIP, a domain-agnostic prompt learning strategy for CLIP that aims to solve the DA problem in the prompt space. We leverage the frozen vision backbone of CLIP to extract both image style (domain) and content information, which we apply to learn prompt tokens. Our prompts are designed to be domain-invariant and class-generalizable, by conditioning prompt learning on image style and content features simultaneously. We use standard supervised contrastive learning in the source domain, while proposing an entropy minimization strategy to align domains in the embedding space given the target domain data. We also consider a scenario where only target domain samples are available during testing, without any source domain data, and propose a cross-domain style mapping network to hallucinate domain-agnostic tokens. Our extensive experiments on three benchmark DA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AD-CLIP compared to existing literature.

The auto-regressive decoding of Large Language Models (LLMs) results in significant overheads in their hardware performance. While recent research has investigated various speculative decoding techniques for multi-token generation, these efforts have primarily focused on improving processing speed such as throughput. Crucially, they often neglect other metrics essential for real-life deployments, such as memory consumption and training cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel parallel prompt decoding that requires only 0.0002% trainable parameters, enabling efficient training on a single A100-40GB GPU in just 16 hours. Inspired by the human natural language generation process, PPD approximates outputs generated at future timesteps in parallel by using multiple prompt tokens. This approach partially recovers the missing conditional dependency information necessary for multi-token generation, resulting in up to a 28% higher acceptance rate for long-range predictions. Furthermore, we present a hardware-aware dynamic sparse tree technique that adaptively optimizes this decoding scheme to fully leverage the computational capacities on different GPUs. Through extensive experiments across LLMs ranging from MobileLlama to Vicuna-13B on a wide range of benchmarks, our approach demonstrates up to 2.49times speedup and maintains a minimal runtime memory overhead of just 0.0004%. More importantly, our parallel prompt decoding can serve as an orthogonal optimization for synergistic integration with existing speculative decoding, showing up to 1.22times further speed improvement. Our code is available at https://github.com/hmarkc/parallel-prompt-decoding.

Knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILTs) benefit from retrieving high-quality relevant contexts from large external knowledge corpora. Learning task-specific retrievers that return relevant contexts at an appropriate level of semantic granularity, such as a document retriever, passage retriever, sentence retriever, and entity retriever, may help to achieve better performance on the end-to-end task. But a task-specific retriever usually has poor generalization ability to new domains and tasks, and it may be costly to deploy a variety of specialised retrievers in practice. We propose a unified generative retriever (UGR) that combines task-specific effectiveness with robust performance over different retrieval tasks in KILTs. To achieve this goal, we make two major contributions: (i) To unify different retrieval tasks into a single generative form, we introduce an n-gram-based identifier for relevant contexts at different levels of granularity in KILTs. And (ii) to address different retrieval tasks with a single model, we employ a prompt learning strategy and investigate three methods to design prompt tokens for each task. In this way, the proposed UGR model can not only share common knowledge across tasks for better generalization, but also perform different retrieval tasks effectively by distinguishing task-specific characteristics. We train UGR on a heterogeneous set of retrieval corpora with well-designed prompts in a supervised and multi-task fashion. Experimental results on the KILT benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of UGR on in-domain datasets, out-of-domain datasets, and unseen tasks.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns about inference costs, increasing the need for research into model compression. While knowledge distillation (KD) is a prominent method for this, research on KD for generative language models like LLMs is relatively sparse, and the approach of distilling student-friendly knowledge, which has shown promising performance in KD for classification models, remains unexplored in generative language models. To explore this approach, we propose PromptKD, a simple yet effective method that utilizes prompt tuning - for the first time in KD - to enable generative language models to transfer student-friendly knowledge. Unlike previous works in classification that require fine-tuning the entire teacher model for extracting student-friendly knowledge, PromptKD achieves similar effects by adding a small number of prompt tokens and tuning only the prompt with student guidance. Extensive experiments on instruction-following datasets using the GPT-2 model family show that PromptKD achieves state-of-the-art performance while adding only 0.0007% of the teacher's parameters as prompts. Further analysis suggests that distilling student-friendly knowledge alleviates exposure bias effectively throughout the entire training process, leading to performance enhancements.

Prompt-based learning has been an effective paradigm for large pretrained language models (LLM), enabling few-shot or even zero-shot learning. Black-box prompt search has received growing interest recently for its distinctive properties of gradient-free optimization, proven particularly useful and powerful for model-as-a-service usage. However, the discrete nature and the complexity of combinatorial optimization hinder the efficiency of modern black-box approaches. Despite extensive research on search algorithms, the crucial aspect of search space design and optimization has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we first conduct a sensitivity analysis by prompting LLM, revealing that only a small number of tokens exert a disproportionate amount of influence on LLM predictions. Leveraging this insight, we propose the Clustering and Pruning for Efficient Black-box Prompt Search (ClaPS), a simple black-box search method that first clusters and prunes the search space to focus exclusively on influential prompt tokens. By employing even simple search methods within the pruned search space, ClaPS achieves state-of-the-art performance across various tasks and LLMs, surpassing the performance of complex approaches while significantly reducing search costs. Our findings underscore the critical role of search space design and optimization in enhancing both the usefulness and the efficiency of black-box prompt-based learning.

The inference of transformer-based large language models consists of two sequential stages: 1) a prefilling stage to compute the KV cache of prompts and generate the first token, and 2) a decoding stage to generate subsequent tokens. For long prompts, the KV cache must be computed for all tokens during the prefilling stage, which can significantly increase the time needed to generate the first token. Consequently, the prefilling stage may become a bottleneck in the generation process. An open question remains whether all prompt tokens are essential for generating the first token. To answer this, we introduce a novel method, LazyLLM, that selectively computes the KV for tokens important for the next token prediction in both the prefilling and decoding stages. Contrary to static pruning approaches that prune the prompt at once, LazyLLM allows language models to dynamically select different subsets of tokens from the context in different generation steps, even though they might be pruned in previous steps. Extensive experiments on standard datasets across various tasks demonstrate that LazyLLM is a generic method that can be seamlessly integrated with existing language models to significantly accelerate the generation without fine-tuning. For instance, in the multi-document question-answering task, LazyLLM accelerates the prefilling stage of the LLama 2 7B model by 2.34x while maintaining accuracy.

The popularity of pre-trained large models has revolutionized downstream tasks across diverse fields, such as language, vision, and multi-modality. To minimize the adaption cost for downstream tasks, many Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques are proposed for language and 2D image pre-trained models. However, the specialized PEFT method for 3D pre-trained models is still under-explored. To this end, we introduce Point-PEFT, a novel framework for adapting point cloud pre-trained models with minimal learnable parameters. Specifically, for a pre-trained 3D model, we freeze most of its parameters, and only tune the newly added PEFT modules on downstream tasks, which consist of a Point-prior Prompt and a Geometry-aware Adapter. The Point-prior Prompt adopts a set of learnable prompt tokens, for which we propose to construct a memory bank with domain-specific knowledge, and utilize a parameter-free attention to enhance the prompt tokens. The Geometry-aware Adapter aims to aggregate point cloud features within spatial neighborhoods to capture fine-grained geometric information through local interactions. Extensive experiments indicate that our Point-PEFT can achieve better performance than the full fine-tuning on various downstream tasks, while using only 5% of the trainable parameters, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Code is released at https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/Point-PEFT.

Large language models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous in practice and are widely used for generation tasks such as translation, summarization and instruction following. However, their enormous size and reliance on autoregressive decoding increase deployment costs and complicate their use in latency-critical applications. In this work, we propose a hybrid approach that combines language models of different sizes to increase the efficiency of autoregressive decoding while maintaining high performance. Our method utilizes a pretrained frozen LLM that encodes all prompt tokens once in parallel, and uses the resulting representations to condition and guide a small language model (SLM), which then generates the response more efficiently. We investigate the combination of encoder-decoder LLMs with both encoder-decoder and decoder-only SLMs from different model families and only require fine-tuning of the SLM. Experiments with various benchmarks show substantial speedups of up to 4times, with minor performance penalties of 1-2% for translation and summarization tasks compared to the LLM.

Segmenting and recognizing diverse object parts is crucial in computer vision and robotics. Despite significant progress in object segmentation, part-level segmentation remains underexplored due to complex boundaries and scarce annotated data. To address this, we propose a novel Weakly-supervised Part Segmentation (WPS) setting and an approach called WPS-SAM, built on the large-scale pre-trained vision foundation model, Segment Anything Model (SAM). WPS-SAM is an end-to-end framework designed to extract prompt tokens directly from images and perform pixel-level segmentation of part regions. During its training phase, it only uses weakly supervised labels in the form of bounding boxes or points. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, through exploiting the rich knowledge embedded in pre-trained foundation models, WPS-SAM outperforms other segmentation models trained with pixel-level strong annotations. Specifically, WPS-SAM achieves 68.93% mIOU and 79.53% mACC on the PartImageNet dataset, surpassing state-of-the-art fully supervised methods by approximately 4% in terms of mIOU.

This paper explores a hierarchical prompting mechanism for the hierarchical image classification (HIC) task. Different from prior HIC methods, our hierarchical prompting is the first to explicitly inject ancestor-class information as a tokenized hint that benefits the descendant-class discrimination. We think it well imitates human visual recognition, i.e., humans may use the ancestor class as a prompt to draw focus on the subtle differences among descendant classes. We model this prompting mechanism into a Transformer with Hierarchical Prompting (TransHP). TransHP consists of three steps: 1) learning a set of prompt tokens to represent the coarse (ancestor) classes, 2) on-the-fly predicting the coarse class of the input image at an intermediate block, and 3) injecting the prompt token of the predicted coarse class into the intermediate feature. Though the parameters of TransHP maintain the same for all input images, the injected coarse-class prompt conditions (modifies) the subsequent feature extraction and encourages a dynamic focus on relatively subtle differences among the descendant classes. Extensive experiments show that TransHP improves image classification on accuracy (e.g., improving ViT-B/16 by +2.83% ImageNet classification accuracy), training data efficiency (e.g., +12.69% improvement under 10% ImageNet training data), and model explainability. Moreover, TransHP also performs favorably against prior HIC methods, showing that TransHP well exploits the hierarchical information. The code is available at: https://github.com/WangWenhao0716/TransHP.

While large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of medical question answering (QA) tasks, they still face challenges with hallucinations and outdated knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a promising solution and has been widely adopted. However, a RAG system can involve multiple flexible components, and there is a lack of best practices regarding the optimal RAG setting for various medical purposes. To systematically evaluate such systems, we propose the Medical Information Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation (MIRAGE), a first-of-its-kind benchmark including 7,663 questions from five medical QA datasets. Using MIRAGE, we conducted large-scale experiments with over 1.8 trillion prompt tokens on 41 combinations of different corpora, retrievers, and backbone LLMs through the MedRAG toolkit introduced in this work. Overall, MedRAG improves the accuracy of six different LLMs by up to 18% over chain-of-thought prompting, elevating the performance of GPT-3.5 and Mixtral to GPT-4-level. Our results show that the combination of various medical corpora and retrievers achieves the best performance. In addition, we discovered a log-linear scaling property and the "lost-in-the-middle" effects in medical RAG. We believe our comprehensive evaluations can serve as practical guidelines for implementing RAG systems for medicine.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, existing research primarily focuses on tuning language and image instructions, ignoring the critical pretraining phase where models learn to process textual and visual modalities jointly. In this paper, we propose a new pretraining paradigm for LMMs to enhance the visual comprehension capabilities of LLMs by introducing a novel cross-modal comprehension stage. Specifically, we design a dynamically learnable prompt token pool and employ the Hungarian algorithm to replace part of the original visual tokens with the most relevant prompt tokens. Then, we conceptualize visual tokens as analogous to a "foreign language" for the LLMs and propose a mixed attention mechanism with bidirectional visual attention and unidirectional textual attention to comprehensively enhance the understanding of visual tokens. Meanwhile, we integrate a detailed caption generation task, leveraging rich descriptions to further facilitate LLMs in understanding visual semantic information. After pretraining on 1.5 million publicly accessible data, we present a new foundation model called Croc. Experimental results demonstrate that Croc achieves new state-of-the-art performance on massive vision-language benchmarks. To support reproducibility and facilitate further research, we release the training code and pre-trained model weights at https://github.com/deepglint/Croc.

The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capability and flexible geometric prompting in general image segmentation. However, SAM often struggles when handling various unconventional images, such as aerial, medical, and non-RGB images. This paper presents CAT-SAM, a ConditionAl Tuning network that adapts SAM toward various unconventional target tasks with just few-shot target samples. CAT-SAM freezes the entire SAM and adapts its mask decoder and image encoder simultaneously with a small number of learnable parameters. The core design is a prompt bridge structure that enables decoder-conditioned joint tuning of the heavyweight image encoder and the lightweight mask decoder. The bridging maps the prompt token of the mask decoder to the image encoder, fostering synergic adaptation of the encoder and the decoder with mutual benefits. We develop two representative tuning strategies for the image encoder which leads to two CAT-SAM variants: one injecting learnable prompt tokens in the input space and the other inserting lightweight adapter networks. Extensive experiments over 11 unconventional tasks show that both CAT-SAM variants achieve superior target segmentation performance consistently even under the very challenging one-shot adaptation setup. Project page: https://xiaoaoran.github.io/projects/CAT-SAM

Recent text-to-image models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality images. However, when tasked with multi-concept generation which creates images containing multiple characters or objects, existing methods often suffer from attribute confusion, resulting in severe text-image inconsistency. We found that attribute confusion occurs when a certain region of the latent features attend to multiple or incorrect prompt tokens. In this work, we propose novel Semantic Protection Diffusion (SPDiffusion) to protect the semantics of regions from the influence of irrelevant tokens, eliminating the confusion of non-corresponding attributes. In the SPDiffusion framework, we design a Semantic Protection Mask (SP-Mask) to represent the relevance of the regions and the tokens, and propose a Semantic Protection Cross-Attention (SP-Attn) to shield the influence of irrelevant tokens on specific regions in the generation process. To evaluate our method, we created a diverse multi-concept benchmark, and SPDiffusion achieves state-of-the-art results on this benchmark, proving its effectiveness. Our method can be combined with many other application methods or backbones, such as ControlNet, Story Diffusion, PhotoMaker and PixArt-alpha to enhance their multi-concept capabilities, demonstrating strong compatibility and scalability.

LLM inference for popular enterprise use cases, such as summarization, RAG, and code-generation, typically observes orders of magnitude longer prompt lengths than generation lengths. This characteristic leads to high cost of prefill and increased response latency. In this paper, we present SwiftKV, a novel model transformation and distillation procedure specifically designed to reduce the time and cost of processing prompt tokens while preserving high quality of generated tokens. SwiftKV combines three key mechanisms: i) SingleInputKV, which prefills later layers' KV cache using a much earlier layer's output, allowing prompt tokens to skip much of the model computation, ii) AcrossKV, which merges the KV caches of neighboring layers to reduce the memory footprint and support larger batch size for higher throughput, and iii) a knowledge-preserving distillation procedure that can adapt existing LLMs for SwiftKV with minimal accuracy impact and low compute and data requirement. For Llama-3.1-8B and 70B, SwiftKV reduces the compute requirement of prefill by 50% and the memory requirement of the KV cache by 62.5% while incurring minimum quality degradation across a wide range of tasks. In the end-to-end inference serving using an optimized vLLM implementation, SwiftKV realizes up to 2x higher aggregate throughput and 60% lower time per output token. It can achieve a staggering 560 TFlops/GPU of normalized inference throughput, which translates to 16K tokens/s for Llama-3.1-70B in 16-bit precision on 4x H100 GPUs.

Language models produce a distribution over the next token; can we use this information to recover the prompt tokens? We consider the problem of language model inversion and show that next-token probabilities contain a surprising amount of information about the preceding text. Often we can recover the text in cases where it is hidden from the user, motivating a method for recovering unknown prompts given only the model's current distribution output. We consider a variety of model access scenarios, and show how even without predictions for every token in the vocabulary we can recover the probability vector through search. On Llama-2 7b, our inversion method reconstructs prompts with a BLEU of 59 and token-level F1 of 78 and recovers 27% of prompts exactly. Code for reproducing all experiments is available at http://github.com/jxmorris12/vec2text.

The widespread popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), partly due to their unique ability to perform in-context learning, has also brought to light the importance of ethical and safety considerations when deploying these pre-trained models. In this work, we focus on investigating machine unlearning for LLMs motivated by data protection regulations. In contrast to the growing literature on fine-tuning methods to achieve unlearning, we focus on a comparatively lightweight alternative called soft prompting to realize the unlearning of a subset of training data. With losses designed to enforce forgetting as well as utility preservation, our framework Soft Prompting for Unlearning (SPUL) learns prompt tokens that can be appended to an arbitrary query to induce unlearning of specific examples at inference time without updating LLM parameters. We conduct a rigorous evaluation of the proposed method and our results indicate that SPUL can significantly improve the trade-off between utility and forgetting in the context of text classification and question answering with LLMs. We further validate our method using multiple LLMs to highlight the scalability of our framework and provide detailed insights into the choice of hyperparameters and the influence of the size of unlearning data. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/karuna-bhaila/llm_unlearning.

Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generation using diffusion models have enabled cost-effective video-editing applications by leveraging pre-trained models, eliminating the need for resource-intensive training. However, the frame-independence of T2I generation often results in poor temporal consistency. Existing methods address this issue through temporal layer fine-tuning or inference-based temporal propagation, but these approaches suffer from high training costs or limited temporal coherence. To address these challenges, we propose a General and Efficient Adapter (GE-Adapter) that integrates temporal-spatial and semantic consistency with Baliteral DDIM inversion. This framework introduces three key components: (1) Frame-based Temporal Consistency Blocks (FTC Blocks) to capture frame-specific features and enforce smooth inter-frame transitions via temporally-aware loss functions; (2) Channel-dependent Spatial Consistency Blocks (SCD Blocks) employing bilateral filters to enhance spatial coherence by reducing noise and artifacts; and (3) Token-based Semantic Consistency Module (TSC Module) to maintain semantic alignment using shared prompt tokens and frame-specific tokens. Our method significantly improves perceptual quality, text-image alignment, and temporal coherence, as demonstrated on the MSR-VTT dataset. Additionally, it achieves enhanced fidelity and frame-to-frame coherence, offering a practical solution for T2V editing.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of vision-language tasks, garnering significant attention in the computer vision. However, their efficient deployment remains a substantial challenge due to high computational costs and memory requirements. Recognizing the redundancy of information within the vision modality, recent studies have explored methods for compressing visual tokens in MLLMs to enhance efficiency in a training-free manner. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods like Fast rely on the attention between visual tokens and prompt text tokens as the importance indicator, overlooking the relevance to response text and thus introducing perception bias. In this paper, we demonstrate that in MLLMs, the [CLS] token in the visual encoder inherently knows which visual tokens are important for MLLMs. Building on this prior, we introduce a simple yet effective method for train-free visual token compression, called VTC-CLS. Firstly, it leverages the attention score of the [CLS] token on visual tokens as an importance indicator for pruning visual tokens. Besides, we also explore ensembling the importance scores derived by the [CLS] token from different layers to capture the key visual information more comprehensively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VTC-CLS achieves the state-of-the-art performance across various tasks compared with baseline methods. It also brings notably less computational costs in a training-free manner, highlighting its effectiveness and superiority. Code and models are available at https://github.com/THU-MIG/VTC-CLS.

PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts. Prompts are functions that map an example from a dataset to a natural language input and target output. Using prompts to train and query language models is an emerging area in NLP that requires new tools that let users develop and refine these prompts collaboratively. PromptSource addresses the emergent challenges in this new setting with (1) a templating language for defining data-linked prompts, (2) an interface that lets users quickly iterate on prompt development by observing outputs of their prompts on many examples, and (3) a community-driven set of guidelines for contributing new prompts to a common pool. Over 2,000 prompts for roughly 170 datasets are already available in PromptSource. PromptSource is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource.

Prompts are crucial to large language models as they provide context information such as topic or logical relationships. Inspired by this, we propose PromptASR, a framework that integrates prompts in end-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E ASR) systems to achieve contextualized ASR with controllable style of transcriptions. Specifically, a dedicated text encoder encodes the text prompts and the encodings are injected into the speech encoder by cross-attending the features from two modalities. When using the ground truth text from preceding utterances as content prompt, the proposed system achieves 21.9% and 6.8% relative word error rate reductions on a book reading dataset and an in-house dataset compared to a baseline ASR system. The system can also take word-level biasing lists as prompt to improve recognition accuracy on rare words. An additional style prompt can be given to the text encoder and guide the ASR system to output different styles of transcriptions. The code is available at icefall.

We present Visual Lexicon, a novel visual language that encodes rich image information into the text space of vocabulary tokens while retaining intricate visual details that are often challenging to convey in natural language. Unlike traditional methods that prioritize either high-level semantics (e.g., CLIP) or pixel-level reconstruction (e.g., VAE), ViLex simultaneously captures rich semantic content and fine visual details, enabling high-quality image generation and comprehensive visual scene understanding. Through a self-supervised learning pipeline, ViLex generates tokens optimized for reconstructing input images using a frozen text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model, preserving the detailed information necessary for high-fidelity semantic-level reconstruction. As an image embedding in the language space, ViLex tokens leverage the compositionality of natural languages, allowing them to be used independently as "text tokens" or combined with natural language tokens to prompt pretrained T2I models with both visual and textual inputs, mirroring how we interact with vision-language models (VLMs). Experiments demonstrate that ViLex achieves higher fidelity in image reconstruction compared to text embeddings--even with a single ViLex token. Moreover, ViLex successfully performs various DreamBooth tasks in a zero-shot, unsupervised manner without fine-tuning T2I models. Additionally, ViLex serves as a powerful vision encoder, consistently improving vision-language model performance across 15 benchmarks relative to a strong SigLIP baseline.

Attention-based neural networks such as transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to exhibit in-context learning (ICL): Given a short prompt sequence of tokens from an unseen task, they can formulate relevant per-token and next-token predictions without any parameter updates. By embedding a sequence of labeled training data and unlabeled test data as a prompt, this allows for transformers to behave like supervised learning algorithms. Indeed, recent work has shown that when training transformer architectures over random instances of linear regression problems, these models' predictions mimic those of ordinary least squares. Towards understanding the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, we investigate the dynamics of ICL in transformers with a single linear self-attention layer trained by gradient flow on linear regression tasks. We show that despite non-convexity, gradient flow with a suitable random initialization finds a global minimum of the objective function. At this global minimum, when given a test prompt of labeled examples from a new prediction task, the transformer achieves prediction error competitive with the best linear predictor over the test prompt distribution. We additionally characterize the robustness of the trained transformer to a variety of distribution shifts and show that although a number of shifts are tolerated, shifts in the covariate distribution of the prompts are not. Motivated by this, we consider a generalized ICL setting where the covariate distributions can vary across prompts. We show that although gradient flow succeeds at finding a global minimum in this setting, the trained transformer is still brittle under mild covariate shifts. We complement this finding with experiments on large, nonlinear transformer architectures which we show are more robust under covariate shifts.

The computational challenges of Large Language Model (LLM) inference remain a significant barrier to their widespread deployment, especially as prompt lengths continue to increase. Due to the quadratic complexity of the attention computation, it takes 30 minutes for an 8B LLM to process a prompt of 1M tokens (i.e., the pre-filling stage) on a single A100 GPU. Existing methods for speeding up prefilling often fail to maintain acceptable accuracy or efficiency when applied to long-context LLMs. To address this gap, we introduce MInference (Milliontokens Inference), a sparse calculation method designed to accelerate pre-filling of long-sequence processing. Specifically, we identify three unique patterns in long-context attention matrices-the A-shape, Vertical-Slash, and Block-Sparsethat can be leveraged for efficient sparse computation on GPUs. We determine the optimal pattern for each attention head offline and dynamically build sparse indices based on the assigned pattern during inference. With the pattern and sparse indices, we perform efficient sparse attention calculations via our optimized GPU kernels to significantly reduce the latency in the pre-filling stage of long-context LLMs. Our proposed technique can be directly applied to existing LLMs without any modifications to the pre-training setup or additional fine-tuning. By evaluating on a wide range of downstream tasks, including InfiniteBench, RULER, PG-19, and Needle In A Haystack, and models including LLaMA-3-1M, GLM4-1M, Yi-200K, Phi-3-128K, and Qwen2-128K, we demonstrate that MInference effectively reduces inference latency by up to 10x for pre-filling on an A100, while maintaining accuracy. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/MInference.

A myriad of different Large Language Models (LLMs) face a common challenge in contextually analyzing table question-answering tasks. These challenges are engendered from (1) finite context windows for large tables, (2) multi-faceted discrepancies amongst tokenization patterns against cell boundaries, and (3) various limitations stemming from data confidentiality in the process of using external models such as gpt-3.5-turbo. We propose a cooperative game dubbed "HiddenTables" as a potential resolution to this challenge. In essence, "HiddenTables" is played between the code-generating LLM "Solver" and the "Oracle" which evaluates the ability of the LLM agents to solve Table QA tasks. This game is based on natural language schemas and importantly, ensures the security of the underlying data. We provide evidential experiments on a diverse set of tables that demonstrate an LLM's collective inability to generalize and perform on complex queries, handle compositional dependencies, and align natural language to programmatic commands when concrete table schemas are provided. Unlike encoder-based models, we have pushed the boundaries of "HiddenTables" to not be limited by the number of rows - therefore we exhibit improved efficiency in prompt and completion tokens. Our infrastructure has spawned a new dataset "PyQTax" that spans across 116,671 question-table-answer triplets and provides additional fine-grained breakdowns & labels for varying question taxonomies. Therefore, in tandem with our academic contributions regarding LLMs' deficiency in TableQA tasks, "HiddenTables" is a tactile manifestation of how LLMs can interact with massive datasets while ensuring data security and minimizing generation costs.

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching billions of parameters. These huge models are memory hungry and incur significant inference latency even on cutting edge AI-accelerators, such as GPUs. Specifically, the time and memory complexity of the attention operation is quadratic in terms of the total context length, i.e., prompt and output tokens. Thus, several optimizations such as key-value tensor caching and FlashAttention computation have been proposed to deliver the low latency demands of applications relying on such large models. However, these techniques do not cater to the computationally distinct nature of different phases during inference. To that end, we propose LeanAttention, a scalable technique of computing self-attention for the token-generation phase (decode-phase) of decoder-only transformer models. LeanAttention enables scaling the attention mechanism implementation for the challenging case of long context lengths by re-designing the execution flow for the decode-phase. We identify that the associative property of online softmax can be treated as a reduction operation thus allowing us to parallelize the attention computation over these large context lengths. We extend the "stream-K" style reduction of tiled calculation to self-attention to enable parallel computation resulting in an average of 2.6x attention execution speedup over FlashAttention-2 and up to 8.33x speedup for 512k context lengths.

Prompt engineering is a technique that involves augmenting a large pre-trained model with task-specific hints, known as prompts, to adapt the model to new tasks. Prompts can be created manually as natural language instructions or generated automatically as either natural language instructions or vector representations. Prompt engineering enables the ability to perform predictions based solely on prompts without updating model parameters, and the easier application of large pre-trained models in real-world tasks. In past years, Prompt engineering has been well-studied in natural language processing. Recently, it has also been intensively studied in vision-language modeling. However, there is currently a lack of a systematic overview of prompt engineering on pre-trained vision-language models. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research in prompt engineering on three types of vision-language models: multimodal-to-text generation models (e.g. Flamingo), image-text matching models (e.g. CLIP), and text-to-image generation models (e.g. Stable Diffusion). For each type of model, a brief model summary, prompting methods, prompting-based applications, and the corresponding responsibility and integrity issues are summarized and discussed. Furthermore, the commonalities and differences between prompting on vision-language models, language models, and vision models are also discussed. The challenges, future directions, and research opportunities are summarized to foster future research on this topic.

Prompt engineering has emerged as an indispensable technique for extending the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). This approach leverages task-specific instructions, known as prompts, to enhance model efficacy without modifying the core model parameters. Rather than updating the model parameters, prompts allow seamless integration of pre-trained models into downstream tasks by eliciting desired model behaviors solely based on the given prompt. Prompts can be natural language instructions that provide context to guide the model or learned vector representations that activate relevant knowledge. This burgeoning field has enabled success across various applications, from question-answering to commonsense reasoning. However, there remains a lack of systematic organization and understanding of the diverse prompt engineering methods and techniques. This survey paper addresses the gap by providing a structured overview of recent advancements in prompt engineering, categorized by application area. For each prompting approach, we provide a summary detailing the prompting methodology, its applications, the models involved, and the datasets utilized. We also delve into the strengths and limitations of each approach and include a taxonomy diagram and table summarizing datasets, models, and critical points of each prompting technique. This systematic analysis enables a better understanding of this rapidly developing field and facilitates future research by illuminating open challenges and opportunities for prompt engineering.

This paper focuses on task-agnostic prompt compression for better generalizability and efficiency. Considering the redundancy in natural language, existing approaches compress prompts by removing tokens or lexical units according to their information entropy obtained from a causal language model such as LLaMa-7B. The challenge is that information entropy may be a suboptimal compression metric: (i) it only leverages unidirectional context and may fail to capture all essential information needed for prompt compression; (ii) it is not aligned with the prompt compression objective. To address these issues, we propose a data distillation procedure to derive knowledge from an LLM to compress prompts without losing crucial information, and meantime, introduce an extractive text compression dataset. We formulate prompt compression as a token classification problem to guarantee the faithfulness of the compressed prompt to the original one, and use a Transformer encoder as the base architecture to capture all essential information for prompt compression from the full bidirectional context. Our approach leads to lower latency by explicitly learning the compression objective with smaller models such as XLM-RoBERTa-large and mBERT. We evaluate our method on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, including MeetingBank, LongBench, ZeroScrolls, GSM8K, and BBH. Despite its small size, our model shows significant performance gains over strong baselines and demonstrates robust generalization ability across different LLMs. Additionally, our model is 3x-6x faster than existing prompt compression methods, while accelerating the end-to-end latency by 1.6x-2.9x with compression ratios of 2x-5x.

Using prompts to utilize language models to perform various downstream tasks, also known as prompt-based learning or prompt-learning, has lately gained significant success in comparison to the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm. Nonetheless, virtually all prompt-based methods are token-level, meaning they all utilize GPT's left-to-right language model or BERT's masked language model to perform cloze-style tasks. In this paper, we attempt to accomplish several NLP tasks in the zero-shot scenario using a BERT original pre-training task abandoned by RoBERTa and other models--Next Sentence Prediction (NSP). Unlike token-level techniques, our sentence-level prompt-based method NSP-BERT does not need to fix the length of the prompt or the position to be predicted, allowing it to handle tasks such as entity linking with ease. Based on the characteristics of NSP-BERT, we offer several quick building templates for various downstream tasks. We suggest a two-stage prompt method for word sense disambiguation tasks in particular. Our strategies for mapping the labels significantly enhance the model's performance on sentence pair tasks. On the FewCLUE benchmark, our NSP-BERT outperforms other zero-shot methods on most of these tasks and comes close to the few-shot methods.

The strength of modern generative models lies in their ability to be controlled through text-based prompts. Typical "hard" prompts are made from interpretable words and tokens, and must be hand-crafted by humans. There are also "soft" prompts, which consist of continuous feature vectors. These can be discovered using powerful optimization methods, but they cannot be easily interpreted, re-used across models, or plugged into a text-based interface. We describe an approach to robustly optimize hard text prompts through efficient gradient-based optimization. Our approach automatically generates hard text-based prompts for both text-to-image and text-to-text applications. In the text-to-image setting, the method creates hard prompts for diffusion models, allowing API users to easily generate, discover, and mix and match image concepts without prior knowledge on how to prompt the model. In the text-to-text setting, we show that hard prompts can be automatically discovered that are effective in tuning LMs for classification.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) systems are being increasingly deployed across all parts of industry and research settings. Developers and end users interact with these systems through the use of prompting or prompt engineering. While prompting is a widespread and highly researched concept, there exists conflicting terminology and a poor ontological understanding of what constitutes a prompt due to the area's nascency. This paper establishes a structured understanding of prompts, by assembling a taxonomy of prompting techniques and analyzing their use. We present a comprehensive vocabulary of 33 vocabulary terms, a taxonomy of 58 text-only prompting techniques, and 40 techniques for other modalities. We further present a meta-analysis of the entire literature on natural language prefix-prompting.

This paper delves into the pivotal role of prompt engineering in unleashing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Prompt engineering is the process of structuring input text for LLMs and is a technique integral to optimizing the efficacy of LLMs. This survey elucidates foundational principles of prompt engineering, such as role-prompting, one-shot, and few-shot prompting, as well as more advanced methodologies such as the chain-of-thought and tree-of-thoughts prompting. The paper sheds light on how external assistance in the form of plugins can assist in this task, and reduce machine hallucination by retrieving external knowledge. We subsequently delineate prospective directions in prompt engineering research, emphasizing the need for a deeper understanding of structures and the role of agents in Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) tools. We discuss how to assess the efficacy of prompt methods from different perspectives and using different methods. Finally, we gather information about the application of prompt engineering in such fields as education and programming, showing its transformative potential. This comprehensive survey aims to serve as a friendly guide for anyone venturing through the big world of LLMs and prompt engineering.

Text entry is an essential task in our day-to-day digital interactions. Numerous intelligent features have been developed to streamline this process, making text entry more effective, efficient, and fluid. These improvements include sentence prediction and user personalization. However, as deep learning-based language models become the norm for these advanced features, the necessity for data collection and model fine-tuning increases. These challenges can be mitigated by harnessing the in-context learning capability of large language models such as GPT-3.5. This unique feature allows the language model to acquire new skills through prompts, eliminating the need for data collection and fine-tuning. Consequently, large language models can learn various text prediction techniques. We initially showed that, for a sentence prediction task, merely prompting GPT-3.5 surpassed a GPT-2 backed system and is comparable with a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 model, with the latter two methods requiring costly data collection, fine-tuning and post-processing. However, the task of prompting large language models to specialize in specific text prediction tasks can be challenging, particularly for designers without expertise in prompt engineering. To address this, we introduce Promptor, a conversational prompt generation agent designed to engage proactively with designers. Promptor can automatically generate complex prompts tailored to meet specific needs, thus offering a solution to this challenge. We conducted a user study involving 24 participants creating prompts for three intelligent text entry tasks, half of the participants used Promptor while the other half designed prompts themselves. The results show that Promptor-designed prompts result in a 35% increase in similarity and 22% in coherence over those by designers.

Large pretrained language models (LLMs) can be rapidly adapted to a wide variety of tasks via a text-to-text approach, where the instruction and input are fed to the model in natural language. Combined with in-context learning (ICL), this paradigm is impressively flexible and powerful. However, it also burdens users with an overwhelming number of choices, many of them arbitrary. Inspired by markup languages like HTML, we contribute a method of using soft-token tags to compose prompt templates. This approach reduces arbitrary decisions and streamlines the application of ICL. Our method is a form of meta-learning for ICL; it learns these tags in advance during a parameter-efficient fine-tuning ``warm-up'' process. The tags can subsequently be used in templates for ICL on new, unseen tasks without any additional fine-tuning. Our experiments with this approach yield promising initial results, improving LLM performance on important enterprise applications such as few-shot and open-world intent detection, as well as text classification in news and legal domains.

Prompting is used to guide or steer a language model in generating an appropriate response that is consistent with the desired outcome. Chaining is a strategy used to decompose complex tasks into smaller, manageable components. In this study, we utilize prompt chaining for extensive legal document classification tasks, which present difficulties due to their intricate domain-specific language and considerable length. Our approach begins with the creation of a concise summary of the original document, followed by a semantic search for related exemplar texts and their corresponding annotations from a training corpus. Finally, we prompt for a label - based on the task - to assign, by leveraging the in-context learning from the few-shot prompt. We demonstrate that through prompt chaining, we can not only enhance the performance over zero-shot, but also surpass the micro-F1 score achieved by larger models, such as ChatGPT zero-shot, using smaller models.

Large language models (LLMs) have witnessed a meteoric rise in popularity among the general public users over the past few months, facilitating diverse downstream tasks with human-level accuracy and proficiency. Prompts play an essential role in this success, which efficiently adapt pre-trained LLMs to task-specific applications by simply prepending a sequence of tokens to the query texts. However, designing and selecting an optimal prompt can be both expensive and demanding, leading to the emergence of Prompt-as-a-Service providers who profit by providing well-designed prompts for authorized use. With the growing popularity of prompts and their indispensable role in LLM-based services, there is an urgent need to protect the copyright of prompts against unauthorized use. In this paper, we propose PromptCARE, the first framework for prompt copyright protection through watermark injection and verification. Prompt watermarking presents unique challenges that render existing watermarking techniques developed for model and dataset copyright verification ineffective. PromptCARE overcomes these hurdles by proposing watermark injection and verification schemes tailor-made for prompts and NLP characteristics. Extensive experiments on six well-known benchmark datasets, using three prevalent pre-trained LLMs (BERT, RoBERTa, and Facebook OPT-1.3b), demonstrate the effectiveness, harmlessness, robustness, and stealthiness of PromptCARE.

The generations of large language models are commonly controlled through prompting techniques, where a user's query to the model is prefixed with a prompt that aims to guide the model's behaviour on the query. The prompts used by companies to guide their models are often treated as secrets, to be hidden from the user making the query. They have even been treated as commodities to be bought and sold. However, there has been anecdotal evidence showing that the prompts can be extracted by a user even when they are kept secret. In this paper, we present a framework for systematically measuring the success of prompt extraction attacks. In experiments with multiple sources of prompts and multiple underlying language models, we find that simple text-based attacks can in fact reveal prompts with high probability.

In recent years, Large Language Models have garnered significant attention for their strong performance in various natural language tasks, such as machine translation and question answering. These models demonstrate an impressive ability to generalize across diverse tasks. However, their effectiveness in tackling domain-specific tasks, such as financial sentiment analysis and monetary policy understanding, remains a topic of debate, as these tasks often require specialized knowledge and precise reasoning. To address such challenges, researchers design various prompts to unlock the models' abilities. By carefully crafting input prompts, researchers can guide these models to produce more accurate responses. Consequently, prompt engineering has become a key focus of study. Despite the advancements in both models and prompt engineering, the relationship between the two-specifically, how prompt design impacts models' ability to perform domain-specific tasks-remains underexplored. This paper aims to bridge this research gap.

Prompt engineering is a challenging and important task due to the high sensitivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the given prompt and the inherent ambiguity of a textual task instruction. Automatic prompt engineering is essential to achieve optimized performance from LLMs. Recent studies have demonstrated the capabilities of LLMs to automatically conduct prompt engineering by employing a meta-prompt that incorporates the outcomes of the last trials and proposes an improved prompt. However, this requires a high-quality benchmark to compare different prompts, which is difficult and expensive to acquire in many real-world use cases. In this work, we introduce a new method for automatic prompt engineering, using a calibration process that iteratively refines the prompt to the user intent. During the optimization process, the system jointly generates synthetic data of boundary use cases and optimizes the prompt according to the generated dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with respect to strong proprietary models on real-world tasks such as moderation and generation. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a limited number of annotated samples. Furthermore, we validate the advantages of each one of the system's key components. Our system is built in a modular way, facilitating easy adaptation to other tasks. The code is available https://github.com/Eladlev/AutoPrompt{here}.

Natural Language Processing algorithms have made incredible progress, but they still struggle when applied to out-of-distribution examples. We address a challenging and underexplored version of this domain adaptation problem, where an algorithm is trained on several source domains, and then applied to examples from unseen domains that are unknown at training time. Particularly, no examples, labeled or unlabeled, or any other knowledge about the target domain are available to the algorithm at training time. We present PADA: An example-based autoregressive Prompt learning algorithm for on-the-fly Any-Domain Adaptation, based on the T5 language model. Given a test example, PADA first generates a unique prompt for it and then, conditioned on this prompt, labels the example with respect to the NLP prediction task. PADA is trained to generate a prompt which is a token sequence of unrestricted length, consisting of Domain Related Features (DRFs) that characterize each of the source domains. Intuitively, the generated prompt is a unique signature that maps the test example to a semantic space spanned by the source domains. In experiments with 3 tasks (text classification and sequence tagging), for a total of 14 multi-source adaptation scenarios, PADA substantially outperforms strong baselines.

Prompt engineering is an essential technique for enhancing the abilities of large language models (LLMs) by providing explicit and specific instructions. It enables LLMs to excel in various tasks, such as arithmetic reasoning, question answering, summarization, relation extraction, machine translation, and sentiment analysis. Researchers have been actively exploring different prompt engineering strategies, such as Chain of Thought (CoT), Zero-CoT, and In-context learning. However, an unresolved problem arises from the fact that current approaches lack a solid theoretical foundation for determining optimal prompts. To address this issue in prompt engineering, we propose a new and effective approach called Prompt Space. Our methodology utilizes text embeddings to obtain basis vectors by matrix decomposition, and then constructs a space for representing all prompts. Prompt Space significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompt paradigms on ten public reasoning benchmarks. Notably, without the help of the CoT method and the prompt "Let's think step by step", Prompt Space shows superior performance over the few-shot method. Overall, our approach provides a robust and fundamental theoretical framework for selecting simple and effective prompts. This advancement marks a significant step towards improving prompt engineering for a wide variety of applications in LLMs.

This paper presents the first ChatGPT4PCG Competition at the 2023 IEEE Conference on Games. The objective of this competition is for participants to create effective prompts for ChatGPT--enabling it to generate Science Birds levels with high stability and character-like qualities--fully using their creativity as well as prompt engineering skills. ChatGPT is a conversational agent developed by OpenAI. Science Birds is selected as the competition platform because designing an Angry Birds-like level is not a trivial task due to the in-game gravity; the quality of the levels is determined by their stability. To lower the entry barrier to the competition, we limit the task to the generation of capitalized English alphabetical characters. We also allow only a single prompt to be used for generating all the characters. Here, the quality of the generated levels is determined by their stability and similarity to the given characters. A sample prompt is provided to participants for their reference. An experiment is conducted to determine the effectiveness of several modified versions of this sample prompt on level stability and similarity by testing them on several characters. To the best of our knowledge, we believe that ChatGPT4PCG is the first competition of its kind and hope to inspire enthusiasm for prompt engineering in procedural content generation.

Text-to-Image generation models have revolutionized the artwork design process and enabled anyone to create high-quality images by entering text descriptions called prompts. Creating a high-quality prompt that consists of a subject and several modifiers can be time-consuming and costly. In consequence, a trend of trading high-quality prompts on specialized marketplaces has emerged. In this paper, we propose a novel attack, namely prompt stealing attack, which aims to steal prompts from generated images by text-to-image generation models. Successful prompt stealing attacks direct violate the intellectual property and privacy of prompt engineers and also jeopardize the business model of prompt trading marketplaces. We first perform a large-scale analysis on a dataset collected by ourselves and show that a successful prompt stealing attack should consider a prompt's subject as well as its modifiers. We then propose the first learning-based prompt stealing attack, PromptStealer, and demonstrate its superiority over two baseline methods quantitatively and qualitatively. We also make some initial attempts to defend PromptStealer. In general, our study uncovers a new attack surface in the ecosystem created by the popular text-to-image generation models. We hope our results can help to mitigate the threat. To facilitate research in this field, we will share our dataset and code with the community.

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed AI across diverse domains, with prompting being central to their success in guiding model outputs. However, manual prompt engineering is both labor-intensive and domain-specific, necessitating the need for automated solutions. We introduce PromptWizard, a novel, fully automated framework for discrete prompt optimization, utilizing a self-evolving, self-adapting mechanism. Through a feedback-driven critique and synthesis process, PromptWizard achieves an effective balance between exploration and exploitation, iteratively refining both prompt instructions and in-context examples to generate human-readable, task-specific prompts. This guided approach systematically improves prompt quality, resulting in superior performance across 45 tasks. PromptWizard excels even with limited training data, smaller LLMs, and various LLM architectures. Additionally, our cost analysis reveals a substantial reduction in API calls, token usage, and overall cost, demonstrating PromptWizard's efficiency, scalability, and advantages over existing prompt optimization strategies.

Prompt learning has emerged as an efficient alternative for fine-tuning foundational models, such as CLIP, for various downstream tasks. Conventionally trained using the task-specific objective, i.e., cross-entropy loss, prompts tend to overfit downstream data distributions and find it challenging to capture task-agnostic general features from the frozen CLIP. This leads to the loss of the model's original generalization capability. To address this issue, our work introduces a self-regularization framework for prompting called PromptSRC (Prompting with Self-regulating Constraints). PromptSRC guides the prompts to optimize for both task-specific and task-agnostic general representations using a three-pronged approach by: (a) regulating prompted representations via mutual agreement maximization with the frozen model, (b) regulating with self-ensemble of prompts over the training trajectory to encode their complementary strengths, and (c) regulating with textual diversity to mitigate sample diversity imbalance with the visual branch. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first regularization framework for prompt learning that avoids overfitting by jointly attending to pre-trained model features, the training trajectory during prompting, and the textual diversity. PromptSRC explicitly steers the prompts to learn a representation space that maximizes performance on downstream tasks without compromising CLIP generalization. We perform extensive experiments on 4 benchmarks where PromptSRC overall performs favorably well compared to the existing methods. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/muzairkhattak/PromptSRC.

Prompt engineering is critical for the development of LLM-based applications. However, it is usually done manually in a "trial and error" fashion. This manual procedure can be time consuming, ineffective, and the generated prompts are, in a lot of cases, sub-optimal. Even for the prompts which seemingly work well, there is always a lingering question: can the prompts be made better with further modifications? To address these questions, in this paper, we investigate prompt engineering automation. We consider a specific use case scenario in which developers/users have drafted initial prompts, but lack the time/expertise to optimize them. We propose PRewrite, an automated tool to rewrite these drafts and to generate highly effective new prompts. PRewrite is based on the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework which allows for end-to-end optimization and our design allows the RL search to happen in a large action space. The automated tool leverages manually crafted prompts as starting points which makes the rewriting procedure more guided and efficient. The generated prompts are human readable, and self-explanatory, unlike some of those in previous works. We conducted extensive experiments on diverse datasets and found that the prompts generated with this new method not only outperform professionally crafted prompts, but also prompts generated with other previously proposed methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success in text-formatted learning problems, and most popular LLMs have been deployed in a black-box fashion. Meanwhile, fine-tuning is usually necessary for a specific downstream task to obtain better performance, and this functionality is provided by the owners of the black-box LLMs. To fine-tune a black-box LLM, labeled data are always required to adjust the model parameters. However, in many real-world applications, LLMs can label textual datasets with even better quality than skilled human annotators, motivating us to explore the possibility of fine-tuning black-box LLMs with unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose unsupervised prompt learning for classification with black-box LLMs, where the learning parameters are the prompt itself and the pseudo labels of unlabeled data. Specifically, the prompt is modeled as a sequence of discrete tokens, and every token has its own to-be-learned categorical distribution. On the other hand, for learning the pseudo labels, we are the first to consider the in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of LLMs: we first identify reliable pseudo-labeled data using the LLM, and then assign pseudo labels to other unlabeled data based on the prompt, allowing the pseudo-labeled data to serve as in-context demonstrations alongside the prompt. Those in-context demonstrations matter: previously, they are involved when the prompt is used for prediction while they are not involved when the prompt is trained; thus, taking them into account during training makes the prompt-learning and prompt-using stages more consistent. Experiments on benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. After unsupervised prompt learning, we can use the pseudo-labeled dataset for further fine-tuning by the owners of the black-box LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform various natural language processing tasks with suitable instruction prompts. However, designing effective prompts manually is challenging and time-consuming. Existing methods for automatic prompt optimization either lack flexibility or efficiency. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to automatically select the optimal prompt for a given input from a finite set of synthetic candidate prompts. Our approach consists of three steps: (1) clustering the training data and generating candidate prompts for each cluster using an LLM-based prompt generator; (2) synthesizing a dataset of input-prompt-output tuples for training a prompt evaluator to rank the prompts based on their relevance to the input; (3) using the prompt evaluator to select the best prompt for a new input at test time. Our approach balances prompt generality-specificity and eliminates the need for resource-intensive training and inference. It demonstrates competitive performance on zero-shot question-answering datasets: GSM8K, MultiArith, and AQuA.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models rely on encoded prompts to guide the image generation process. Typically, these prompts are extended to a fixed length by adding padding tokens before text encoding. Despite being a default practice, the influence of padding tokens on the image generation process has not been investigated. In this work, we conduct the first in-depth analysis of the role padding tokens play in T2I models. We develop two causal techniques to analyze how information is encoded in the representation of tokens across different components of the T2I pipeline. Using these techniques, we investigate when and how padding tokens impact the image generation process. Our findings reveal three distinct scenarios: padding tokens may affect the model's output during text encoding, during the diffusion process, or be effectively ignored. Moreover, we identify key relationships between these scenarios and the model's architecture (cross or self-attention) and its training process (frozen or trained text encoder). These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of padding tokens, potentially informing future model design and training practices in T2I systems.

The rise of capabilities expressed by large language models has been quickly followed by the integration of the same complex systems into application level logic. Algorithms, programs, systems, and companies are built around structured prompting to black box models where the majority of the design and implementation lies in capturing and quantifying the `agent mode'. The standard way to shape a closed language model is to prime it for a specific task with a tailored prompt, often initially handwritten by a human. The textual prompts co-evolve with the codebase, taking shape over the course of project life as artifacts which must be reviewed and maintained, just as the traditional code files might be. Unlike traditional code, we find that prompts do not receive effective static testing and linting to prevent runtime issues. In this work, we present a novel dataset called PromptSet, with more than 61,000 unique developer prompts used in open source Python programs. We perform analysis on this dataset and introduce the notion of a static linter for prompts. Released with this publication is a HuggingFace dataset and a Github repository to recreate collection and processing efforts, both under the name pisterlabs/promptset.

In prompt tuning, a prefix or suffix text is added to the prompt, and the embeddings (soft prompts) or token indices (hard prompts) of the prefix/suffix are optimized to gain more control over language models for specific tasks. This approach eliminates the need for hand-crafted prompt engineering or explicit model fine-tuning. Prompt tuning is significantly more parameter-efficient than model fine-tuning, as it involves optimizing partial inputs of language models to produce desired outputs. In this work, we aim to further reduce the amount of trainable parameters required for a language model to perform well on specific tasks. We propose Low-rank Prompt Tuning (LoPT), a low-rank model for prompts that achieves efficient prompt optimization. The proposed method demonstrates similar outcomes to full parameter prompt tuning while reducing the number of trainable parameters by a factor of 5. It also provides promising results compared to the state-of-the-art methods that would require 10 to 20 times more parameters.

In-context generation is a key component of large language models' (LLMs) open-task generalization capability. By leveraging a few examples as context, LLMs can perform both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Recent advancements in auto-regressive vision-language models (VLMs) built upon LLMs have showcased impressive performance in text-to-image generation. However, the potential of in-context learning for general image generation tasks remains largely unexplored. To address this, we introduce X-Prompt, a purely auto-regressive large-vision language model designed to deliver competitive performance across a wide range of both seen and unseen image generation tasks, all within a unified in-context learning framework. X-Prompt incorporates a specialized design that efficiently compresses valuable features from in-context examples, supporting longer in-context token sequences and improving its ability to generalize to unseen tasks. A unified training task for both text and image prediction enables X-Prompt to handle general image generation with enhanced task awareness from in-context examples. Extensive experiments validate the model's performance across diverse seen image generation tasks and its capacity to generalize to previously unseen tasks.

This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website http://pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at https://github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.

Prompt-learning has become a new paradigm in modern natural language processing, which directly adapts pre-trained language models (PLMs) to cloze-style prediction, autoregressive modeling, or sequence to sequence generation, resulting in promising performances on various tasks. However, no standard implementation framework of prompt-learning is proposed yet, and most existing prompt-learning codebases, often unregulated, only provide limited implementations for specific scenarios. Since there are many details such as templating strategy, initializing strategy, and verbalizing strategy, etc. need to be considered in prompt-learning, practitioners face impediments to quickly adapting the desired prompt learning methods to their applications. In this paper, we present {OpenPrompt}, a unified easy-to-use toolkit to conduct prompt-learning over PLMs. OpenPrompt is a research-friendly framework that is equipped with efficiency, modularity, and extendibility, and its combinability allows the freedom to combine different PLMs, task formats, and prompting modules in a unified paradigm. Users could expediently deploy prompt-learning frameworks and evaluate the generalization of them on different NLP tasks without constraints. OpenPrompt is publicly released at { https://github.com/thunlp/OpenPrompt}.

We present Prompt Cache, an approach for accelerating inference for large language models (LLM) by reusing attention states across different LLM prompts. Many input prompts have overlapping text segments, such as system messages, prompt templates, and documents provided for context. Our key insight is that by precomputing and storing the attention states of these frequently occurring text segments on the inference server, we can efficiently reuse them when these segments appear in user prompts. Prompt Cache employs a schema to explicitly define such reusable text segments, called prompt modules. The schema ensures positional accuracy during attention state reuse and provides users with an interface to access cached states in their prompt. Using a prototype implementation, we evaluate Prompt Cache across several LLMs. We show that Prompt Cache significantly reduce latency in time-to-first-token, especially for longer prompts such as document-based question answering and recommendations. The improvements range from 8x for GPU-based inference to 60x for CPU-based inference, all while maintaining output accuracy and without the need for model parameter modifications.

Well-designed prompts have demonstrated the potential to guide text-to-image models in generating amazing images. Although existing prompt engineering methods can provide high-level guidance, it is challenging for novice users to achieve the desired results by manually entering prompts due to a discrepancy between novice-user-input prompts and the model-preferred prompts. To bridge the distribution gap between user input behavior and model training datasets, we first construct a novel Coarse-Fine Granularity Prompts dataset (CFP) and propose a novel User-Friendly Fine-Grained Text Generation framework (UF-FGTG) for automated prompt optimization. For CFP, we construct a novel dataset for text-to-image tasks that combines coarse and fine-grained prompts to facilitate the development of automated prompt generation methods. For UF-FGTG, we propose a novel framework that automatically translates user-input prompts into model-preferred prompts. Specifically, we propose a prompt refiner that continually rewrites prompts to empower users to select results that align with their unique needs. Meanwhile, we integrate image-related loss functions from the text-to-image model into the training process of text generation to generate model-preferred prompts. Additionally, we propose an adaptive feature extraction module to ensure diversity in the generated results. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is capable of generating more visually appealing and diverse images than previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 5% across six quality and aesthetic metrics.

Text-to-image generation has seen an explosion of interest since 2021. Today, beautiful and intriguing digital images and artworks can be synthesized from textual inputs ("prompts") with deep generative models. Online communities around text-to-image generation and AI generated art have quickly emerged. This paper identifies six types of prompt modifiers used by practitioners in the online community based on a 3-month ethnographic study. The novel taxonomy of prompt modifiers provides researchers a conceptual starting point for investigating the practice of text-to-image generation, but may also help practitioners of AI generated art improve their images. We further outline how prompt modifiers are applied in the practice of "prompt engineering." We discuss research opportunities of this novel creative practice in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The paper concludes with a discussion of broader implications of prompt engineering from the perspective of Human-AI Interaction (HAI) in future applications beyond the use case of text-to-image generation and AI generated art.

Open-vocabulary models are a promising new paradigm for image classification. Unlike traditional classification models, open-vocabulary models classify among any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language during inference. This natural language, called "prompts", typically consists of a set of hand-written templates (e.g., "a photo of a {}") which are completed with each of the category names. This work introduces a simple method to generate higher accuracy prompts, without relying on any explicit knowledge of the task domain and with far fewer hand-constructed sentences. To achieve this, we combine open-vocabulary models with large language models (LLMs) to create Customized Prompts via Language models (CuPL, pronounced "couple"). In particular, we leverage the knowledge contained in LLMs in order to generate many descriptive sentences that contain important discriminating characteristics of the image categories. This allows the model to place a greater importance on these regions in the image when making predictions. We find that this straightforward and general approach improves accuracy on a range of zero-shot image classification benchmarks, including over one percentage point gain on ImageNet. Finally, this simple baseline requires no additional training and remains completely zero-shot. Code available at https://github.com/sarahpratt/CuPL.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable proficiency in addressing a diverse array of tasks within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain, with various prompt design strategies significantly augmenting their capabilities. However, these prompts, while beneficial, each possess inherent limitations. The primary prompt design methodologies are twofold: The first, exemplified by the Chain of Thought (CoT), involves manually crafting prompts specific to individual datasets, hence termed Expert-Designed Prompts (EDPs). Once these prompts are established, they are unalterable, and their effectiveness is capped by the expertise of the human designers. When applied to LLMs, the static nature of EDPs results in a uniform approach to both simple and complex problems within the same dataset, leading to the inefficient use of tokens for straightforward issues. The second method involves prompts autonomously generated by the LLM, known as LLM-Derived Prompts (LDPs), which provide tailored solutions to specific problems, mitigating the limitations of EDPs. However, LDPs may encounter a decline in performance when tackling complex problems due to the potential for error accumulation during the solution planning process. To address these challenges, we have conceived a novel Prompt Recursive Search (PRS) framework that leverages the LLM to generate solutions specific to the problem, thereby conserving tokens. The framework incorporates an assessment of problem complexity and an adjustable structure, ensuring a reduction in the likelihood of errors. We have substantiated the efficacy of PRS framework through extensive experiments using LLMs with different numbers of parameters across a spectrum of datasets in various domains. Compared to the CoT method, the PRS method has increased the accuracy on the BBH dataset by 8% using Llama3-7B model, achieving a 22% improvement.

Certain statistical models are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Many approaches to prompting and pre-training these models involve the automated generation of these prompts. We call these approaches meta-prompting, or prompting to obtain prompts. We propose a theoretical framework based on category theory to generalize and describe them. This framework is flexible enough to account for LLM stochasticity; and allows us to obtain formal results around task agnosticity and equivalence of various meta-prompting approaches. We experiment with meta-prompting in two active areas of model research: creativity and ideation. We find that user preference favors (p < 0.01) the prompts generated under meta-prompting, as well as their corresponding outputs, over a series of hardcoded baseline prompts that include the original task prompt. Using our framework, we argue that meta-prompting is more effective than basic prompting at generating desirable outputs.

The latest generation of LLMs can be prompted to achieve impressive zero-shot or few-shot performance in many NLP tasks. However, since performance is highly sensitive to the choice of prompts, considerable effort has been devoted to crowd-sourcing prompts or designing methods for prompt optimisation. Yet, we still lack a systematic understanding of how linguistic properties of prompts correlate with task performance. In this work, we investigate how LLMs of different sizes, pre-trained and instruction-tuned, perform on prompts that are semantically equivalent, but vary in linguistic structure. We investigate both grammatical properties such as mood, tense, aspect and modality, as well as lexico-semantic variation through the use of synonyms. Our findings contradict the common assumption that LLMs achieve optimal performance on lower perplexity prompts that reflect language use in pretraining or instruction-tuning data. Prompts transfer poorly between datasets or models, and performance cannot generally be explained by perplexity, word frequency, ambiguity or prompt length. Based on our results, we put forward a proposal for a more robust and comprehensive evaluation standard for prompting research.

Prompting ChatGPT to achieve complex goals (e.g., creating a customer support chatbot) often demands meticulous prompt engineering, including aspects like fluent writing and chain-of-thought techniques. While emerging prompt optimizers can automatically refine many of these aspects, we argue that clearly conveying customized requirements (e.g., how to handle diverse inputs) remains a human-centric challenge. In this work, we introduce Requirement-Oriented Prompt Engineering (ROPE), a paradigm that focuses human attention on generating clear, complete requirements during prompting. We implement ROPE through an assessment and training suite that provides deliberate practice with LLM-generated feedback. In a study with 30 novices, we show that requirement-focused training doubles novices' prompting performance, significantly outperforming conventional prompt engineering training and prompt optimization. We also demonstrate that high-quality LLM outputs are directly tied to the quality of input requirements. Our work paves the way for more effective task delegation in human-LLM collaborative prompting.

Image segmentation is usually addressed by training a model for a fixed set of object classes. Incorporating additional classes or more complex queries later is expensive as it requires re-training the model on a dataset that encompasses these expressions. Here we propose a system that can generate image segmentations based on arbitrary prompts at test time. A prompt can be either a text or an image. This approach enables us to create a unified model (trained once) for three common segmentation tasks, which come with distinct challenges: referring expression segmentation, zero-shot segmentation and one-shot segmentation. We build upon the CLIP model as a backbone which we extend with a transformer-based decoder that enables dense prediction. After training on an extended version of the PhraseCut dataset, our system generates a binary segmentation map for an image based on a free-text prompt or on an additional image expressing the query. We analyze different variants of the latter image-based prompts in detail. This novel hybrid input allows for dynamic adaptation not only to the three segmentation tasks mentioned above, but to any binary segmentation task where a text or image query can be formulated. Finally, we find our system to adapt well to generalized queries involving affordances or properties. Code is available at https://eckerlab.org/code/clipseg.

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive SWOT analysis of prompt engineering techniques within the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs). Emphasizing linguistic principles, we examine various techniques to identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Our findings provide insights into enhancing AI interactions and improving language model comprehension of human prompts. The analysis covers techniques including template-based approaches and fine-tuning, addressing the problems and challenges associated with each. The conclusion offers future research directions aimed at advancing the effectiveness of prompt engineering in optimizing human-machine communication.

Prompt tuning has emerged as an effective rehearsal-free technique for class-incremental learning (CIL) that learns a tiny set of task-specific parameters (or prompts) to instruct a pre-trained transformer to learn on a sequence of tasks. Albeit effective, prompt tuning methods do not lend well in the multi-label class incremental learning (MLCIL) scenario (where an image contains multiple foreground classes) due to the ambiguity in selecting the correct prompt(s) corresponding to different foreground objects belonging to multiple tasks. To circumvent this issue we propose to eliminate the prompt selection mechanism by maintaining task-specific pathways, which allow us to learn representations that do not interact with the ones from the other tasks. Since independent pathways in truly incremental scenarios will result in an explosion of computation due to the quadratically complex multi-head self-attention (MSA) operation in prompt tuning, we propose to reduce the original patch token embeddings into summarized tokens. Prompt tuning is then applied to these fewer summarized tokens to compute the final representation. Our proposed method Multi-Label class incremental learning via summarising pAtch tokeN Embeddings (MULTI-LANE) enables learning disentangled task-specific representations in MLCIL while ensuring fast inference. We conduct experiments in common benchmarks and demonstrate that our MULTI-LANE achieves a new state-of-the-art in MLCIL. Additionally, we show that MULTI-LANE is also competitive in the CIL setting. Source code available at https://github.com/tdemin16/multi-lane

Prompt learning's fine-tune performance on text classification tasks has attracted the NLP community. This paper applies it to resume information extraction, improving existing methods for this task. We created manual templates and verbalizers tailored to resume texts and compared the performance of Masked Language Model (MLM) and Seq2Seq PLMs. Also, we enhanced the verbalizer design for Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning, contributing to prompt template design across NLP tasks. We present the Manual Knowledgeable Verbalizer (MKV), a rule for constructing verbalizers for specific applications. Our tests show that MKV rules yield more effective, robust templates and verbalizers than existing methods. Our MKV approach resolved sample imbalance, surpassing current automatic prompt methods. This study underscores the value of tailored prompt learning for resume extraction, stressing the importance of custom-designed templates and verbalizers.

Large-scale text-to-image generative models have been a ground-breaking development in generative AI, with diffusion models showing their astounding ability to synthesize convincing images following an input text prompt. The goal of image editing research is to give users control over the generated images by modifying the text prompt. Current image editing techniques are susceptible to unintended modifications of regions outside the targeted area, such as on the background or on distractor objects which have some semantic or visual relationship with the targeted object. According to our experimental findings, inaccurate cross-attention maps are at the root of this problem. Based on this observation, we propose Dynamic Prompt Learning (DPL) to force cross-attention maps to focus on correct noun words in the text prompt. By updating the dynamic tokens for nouns in the textual input with the proposed leakage repairment losses, we achieve fine-grained image editing over particular objects while preventing undesired changes to other image regions. Our method DPL, based on the publicly available Stable Diffusion, is extensively evaluated on a wide range of images, and consistently obtains superior results both quantitatively (CLIP score, Structure-Dist) and qualitatively (on user-evaluation). We show improved prompt editing results for Word-Swap, Prompt Refinement, and Attention Re-weighting, especially for complex multi-object scenes.

Prompting interfaces allow users to quickly adjust the output of generative models in both vision and language. However, small changes and design choices in the prompt can lead to significant differences in the output. In this work, we develop a black-box framework for generating adversarial prompts for unstructured image and text generation. These prompts, which can be standalone or prepended to benign prompts, induce specific behaviors into the generative process, such as generating images of a particular object or generating high perplexity text.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress in text generation tasks via fine-tuning. While, it is challenging to fine-tune PLMs in a data-scarce situation. Therefore, it is non-trivial to develop a general and lightweight model that can adapt to various text generation tasks based on PLMs. To fulfill this purpose, the recent prompt-based learning offers a potential solution. In this paper, we improve this technique and propose a novel prompt-based method (PTG) for text generation in a transferable setting. First, PTG learns a set of source prompts for various source generation tasks and then transfers these prompts as target prompts to perform target generation tasks. To consider both task- and instance-level information, we design an adaptive attention mechanism to derive the target prompts. For each data instance, PTG learns a specific target prompt by attending to highly relevant source prompts. In extensive experiments, PTG yields competitive or better results than fine-tuning methods. We release our source prompts as an open resource, where users can add or reuse them to improve new text generation tasks for future research. Code and data can be available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Transfer-Prompts-for-Text-Generation.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves updating at least a few billions of parameters. A more parameter-efficient approach is Prompt Tuning (PT), which updates only a few learnable tokens, and differently, In-Context Learning (ICL) adapts the model to a new task by simply including examples in the input without any training. When applying optimization-based methods, such as fine-tuning and PT for few-shot learning, the model is specifically adapted to the small set of training examples, whereas ICL leaves the model unchanged. This distinction makes traditional learning methods more prone to overfitting; in contrast, ICL is less sensitive to the few-shot scenario. While ICL is not prone to overfitting, it does not fully extract the information that exists in the training examples. This work introduces Context-aware Prompt Tuning (CPT), a method inspired by ICL, PT, and adversarial attacks. We build on the ICL strategy of concatenating examples before the input, but we extend this by PT-like learning, refining the context embedding through iterative optimization to extract deeper insights from the training examples. We carefully modify specific context tokens, considering the unique structure of input and output formats. Inspired by adversarial attacks, we adjust the input based on the labels present in the context, focusing on minimizing, rather than maximizing, the loss. Moreover, we apply a projected gradient descent algorithm to keep token embeddings close to their original values, under the assumption that the user-provided data is inherently valuable. Our method has been shown to achieve superior accuracy across multiple classification tasks using various LLM models.

In Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), it is crucial to ensure the user's comprehension of a reason for correction. Existing studies present tokens, examples, and hints as to the basis for correction but do not directly explain the reasons for corrections. Although methods that use Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide direct explanations in natural language have been proposed for various tasks, no such method exists for GEC. Generating explanations for GEC corrections involves aligning input and output tokens, identifying correction points, and presenting corresponding explanations consistently. However, it is not straightforward to specify a complex format to generate explanations, because explicit control of generation is difficult with prompts. This study introduces a method called controlled generation with Prompt Insertion (PI) so that LLMs can explain the reasons for corrections in natural language. In PI, LLMs first correct the input text, and then we automatically extract the correction points based on the rules. The extracted correction points are sequentially inserted into the LLM's explanation output as prompts, guiding the LLMs to generate explanations for the correction points. We also create an Explainable GEC (XGEC) dataset of correction reasons by annotating NUCLE, CoNLL2013, and CoNLL2014. Although generations from GPT-3 and ChatGPT using original prompts miss some correction points, the generation control using PI can explicitly guide to describe explanations for all correction points, contributing to improved performance in generating correction reasons.

Generative models, widely utilized in various applications, can often struggle with prompts corresponding to partial tokens. This struggle stems from tokenization, where partial tokens fall out of distribution during inference, leading to incorrect or nonsensical outputs. This paper examines a technique to alleviate the tokenization artifact on text completion in generative models, maintaining performance even in regular non-subword cases. The method, termed token alignment, involves backtracking to the last complete tokens and ensuring the model's generation aligns with the prompt. This approach showcases marked improvement across many partial token scenarios, including nuanced cases like space-prefix and partial indentation, with only a minor time increase. The technique and analysis detailed in this paper contribute to the continuous advancement of generative models in handling partial inputs, bearing relevance for applications like code completion and text autocompletion.

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.

Prompt engineering has emerged as a powerful technique for optimizing large language models (LLMs) for specific applications, enabling faster prototyping and improved performance, and giving rise to the interest of the community in protecting proprietary system prompts. In this work, we explore a novel perspective on prompt privacy through the lens of membership inference. We develop Prompt Detective, a statistical method to reliably determine whether a given system prompt was used by a third-party language model. Our approach relies on a statistical test comparing the distributions of two groups of model outputs corresponding to different system prompts. Through extensive experiments with a variety of language models, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Prompt Detective for prompt membership inference. Our work reveals that even minor changes in system prompts manifest in distinct response distributions, enabling us to verify prompt usage with statistical significance.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in different fields, including standard Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. To elicit knowledge from LLMs, prompts play a key role, consisting of natural language instructions. Most open and closed source LLMs are trained on available labeled and unlabeled resources--digital content such as text, images, audio, and videos. Hence, these models have better knowledge for high-resourced languages but struggle with low-resourced languages. Since prompts play a crucial role in understanding their capabilities, the language used for prompts remains an important research question. Although there has been significant research in this area, it is still limited, and less has been explored for medium to low-resourced languages. In this study, we investigate different prompting strategies (native vs. non-native) on 11 different NLP tasks associated with 12 different Arabic datasets (9.7K data points). In total, we conducted 197 experiments involving 3 LLMs, 12 datasets, and 3 prompting strategies. Our findings suggest that, on average, the non-native prompt performs the best, followed by mixed and native prompts.

Long prompt leads to huge hardware costs when using Large Language Models (LLMs). Unfortunately, many tasks, such as summarization, inevitably introduce long task-inputs, and the wide application of in-context learning easily makes the prompt length explode. Inspired by the language understanding ability of LLMs, this paper proposes SelfCP, which uses the LLM itself to Compress long Prompt into compact virtual tokens. SelfCP applies a general frozen LLM twice, first as an encoder to compress the prompt and then as a decoder to generate responses. Specifically, given a long prompt, we place special tokens within the lengthy segment for compression and signal the LLM to generate k virtual tokens. Afterward, the virtual tokens concatenate with the uncompressed prompt and are fed into the same LLM to generate the response. In general, SelfCP facilitates the unconditional and conditional compression of prompts, fitting both standard tasks and those with specific objectives. Since the encoder and decoder are frozen, SelfCP only contains 17M trainable parameters and allows for convenient adaptation across various backbones. We implement SelfCP with two LLM backbones and evaluate it in both in- and out-domain tasks. Results show that the compressed virtual tokens can substitute 12 times larger original prompts effectively

Prompt compression is a promising approach to speeding up language model inference without altering the generative model. Prior works compress prompts into smaller sequences of learned tokens using an encoder that is trained as a LowRank Adaptation (LoRA) of the inference language model. However, we show that the encoder does not need to keep the original language model's architecture to achieve useful compression. We introduce the Attention-Only Compressor (AOC), which learns a prompt compression encoder after removing the multilayer perceptron (MLP) layers in the Transformer blocks of a language model, resulting in an encoder with roughly 67% less parameters compared to the original model. Intriguingly we find that, across a range of compression ratios up to 480x, AOC can better regenerate prompts and outperform a baseline compression encoder that is a LoRA of the inference language model without removing MLP layers. These results demonstrate that the architecture of prompt compression encoders does not need to be identical to that of the original decoder language model, paving the way for further research into architectures and approaches for prompt compression.

Vision-language large models have achieved remarkable success in various multi-modal tasks, yet applying them to video understanding remains challenging due to the inherent complexity and computational demands of video data. While training-based video-LLMs deliver high performance, they often require substantial resources for training and inference. Conversely, training-free approaches offer a more efficient alternative by adapting pre-trained image-LLMs models for video tasks without additional training, but they face inference efficiency bottlenecks due to the large number of visual tokens generated from video frames. In this work, we present a novel prompt-guided visual perception framework (abbreviated as Free Video-LLM) for efficient inference of training-free video LLMs. The proposed framework decouples spatial-temporal dimension and performs temporal frame sampling and spatial RoI cropping respectively based on task-specific prompts. Our method effectively reduces the number of visual tokens while maintaining high performance across multiple video question-answering benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive results with significantly fewer tokens, offering an optimal trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art video LLMs. The code will be available at https://github.com/contrastive/FreeVideoLLM.

LLMs have demonstrated commendable performance across diverse domains. Nevertheless, formulating high-quality prompts to assist them in their work poses a challenge for non-AI experts. Existing research in prompt engineering suggests somewhat scattered optimization principles and designs empirically dependent prompt optimizers. Unfortunately, these endeavors lack a structural design, incurring high learning costs and it is not conducive to the iterative updating of prompts, especially for non-AI experts. Inspired by structured reusable programming languages, we propose LangGPT, a structural prompt design framework. Furthermore, we introduce Minstrel, a multi-generative agent system with reflection to automate the generation of structural prompts. Experiments and the case study illustrate that structural prompts generated by Minstrel or written manually significantly enhance the performance of LLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the ease of use of structural prompts through a user survey in our online community.

Textual prompt tuning has demonstrated significant performance improvements in adapting natural language processing models to a variety of downstream tasks by treating hand-engineered prompts as trainable parameters. Inspired by the success of textual prompting, several studies have investigated the efficacy of visual prompt tuning. In this work, we present Visual Prompt Adaptation (VPA), the first framework that generalizes visual prompting with test-time adaptation. VPA introduces a small number of learnable tokens, enabling fully test-time and storage-efficient adaptation without necessitating source-domain information. We examine our VPA design under diverse adaptation settings, encompassing single-image, batched-image, and pseudo-label adaptation. We evaluate VPA on multiple tasks, including out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, corruption robustness, and domain adaptation. Experimental results reveal that VPA effectively enhances OOD generalization by 3.3% across various models, surpassing previous test-time approaches. Furthermore, we show that VPA improves corruption robustness by 6.5% compared to strong baselines. Finally, we demonstrate that VPA also boosts domain adaptation performance by relatively 5.2%. Our VPA also exhibits marked effectiveness in improving the robustness of zero-shot recognition for vision-language models.

Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied to multilingual pretrained language models for zero-shot cross-lingual understanding. However, most previous studies primarily focused on sentence-level classification tasks, and only a few considered token-level labeling tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging. In this paper, we propose Token-Level Prompt Decomposition (ToPro), which facilitates the prompt-based method for token-level sequence labeling tasks. The ToPro method decomposes an input sentence into single tokens and applies one prompt template to each token. Our experiments on multilingual NER and POS tagging datasets demonstrate that ToPro-based fine-tuning outperforms Vanilla fine-tuning and Prompt-Tuning in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, especially for languages that are typologically different from the source language English. Our method also attains state-of-the-art performance when employed with the mT5 model. Besides, our exploratory study in multilingual large language models shows that ToPro performs much better than the current in-context learning method. Overall, the performance improvements show that ToPro could potentially serve as a novel and simple benchmarking method for sequence labeling tasks.

We tackle the challenge of open-vocabulary segmentation, where we need to identify objects from a wide range of categories in different environments, using text prompts as our input. To overcome this challenge, existing methods often use multi-modal models like CLIP, which combine image and text features in a shared embedding space to bridge the gap between limited and extensive vocabulary recognition, resulting in a two-stage approach: In the first stage, a mask generator takes an input image to generate mask proposals, and the in the second stage the target mask is picked based on the query. However, the expected target mask may not exist in the generated mask proposals, which leads to an unexpected output mask. In our work, we propose a novel approach named Prompt-guided Mask Proposal (PMP) where the mask generator takes the input text prompts and generates masks guided by these prompts. Compared with mask proposals generated without input prompts, masks generated by PMP are better aligned with the input prompts. To realize PMP, we designed a cross-attention mechanism between text tokens and query tokens which is capable of generating prompt-guided mask proposals after each decoding. We combined our PMP with several existing works employing a query-based segmentation backbone and the experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, showcasing significant improvements over the current two-stage models (1% ~ 3% absolute performance gain in terms of mIOU). The steady improvement in performance across these benchmarks indicates the effective generalization of our proposed lightweight prompt-aware method.

On-device large language models (LLMs) are catalyzing novel mobile applications such as UI task automation and personalized email auto-reply, without giving away users' private data. However, on-device LLMs still suffer from unacceptably long inference latency, especially the time to first token (prefill stage) due to the need of long context for accurate, personalized content generation, as well as the lack of parallel computing capacity of mobile CPU/GPU. To enable practical on-device LLM, we present mllm-NPU, the first-of-its-kind LLM inference system that efficiently leverages on-device Neural Processing Unit (NPU) offloading. Essentially, mllm-NPU is an algorithm-system co-design that tackles a few semantic gaps between the LLM architecture and contemporary NPU design. Specifically, it re-constructs the prompt and model in three levels: (1) At prompt level, it divides variable-length prompts into multiple fixed-sized chunks while maintaining data dependencies; (2) At tensor level, it identifies and extracts significant outliers to run on the CPU/GPU in parallel with minimal overhead; (3) At block level, it schedules Transformer blocks in an out-of-order manner to the CPU/GPU and NPU based on their hardware affinity and sensitivity to accuracy. Compared to competitive baselines, mllm-NPU achieves 22.4x faster prefill speed and 30.7x energy savings on average, and up to 32.8x speedup in an end-to-end real-world application. For the first time, mllm-NPU achieves more than 1,000 tokens/sec prefilling for a billion-sized model (Qwen1.5-1.8B), paving the way towards practical on-device LLM.

Large language models (LLMs) have played a fundamental role in various natural language processing tasks with powerful prompt techniques. However, in real-world applications, there are often similar prompt components for repeated queries, which causes significant computational burdens during inference. Existing prompt compression and direct fine-tuning methods aim to tackle these challenges, yet they frequently struggle to strike an optimal balance between cost-efficiency and performance effectiveness, especially in complex tasks such as NL2Code. In this paper, we propose a novel method namely PromptIntern to internalize the prompt knowledge into model parameters via progressive fine-tuning. Our method enables LLMs to emulate the human learning process for a new task, where detailed templates and examples in a prompt are gradually internalized and phased out progressively as the model grows accustomed to the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reduces inference tokens over 90%, speedups inference by 4.2 times, and saves 88.3% monetary cost.

Drawing upon StyleGAN's expressivity and disentangled latent space, existing 2D approaches employ textual prompting to edit facial images with different attributes. In contrast, 3D-aware approaches that generate faces at different target poses require attribute-specific classifiers, learning separate model weights for each attribute, and are not scalable for novel attributes. In this work, we propose an efficient, plug-and-play, 3D-aware face editing framework based on attribute-specific prompt learning, enabling the generation of facial images with controllable attributes across various target poses. To this end, we introduce a text-driven learnable style token-based latent attribute editor (LAE). The LAE harnesses a pre-trained vision-language model to find text-guided attribute-specific editing direction in the latent space of any pre-trained 3D-aware GAN. It utilizes learnable style tokens and style mappers to learn and transform this editing direction to 3D latent space. To train LAE with multiple attributes, we use directional contrastive loss and style token loss. Furthermore, to ensure view consistency and identity preservation across different poses and attributes, we employ several 3D-aware identity and pose preservation losses. Our experiments show that our proposed framework generates high-quality images with 3D awareness and view consistency while maintaining attribute-specific features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on different facial attributes, including hair color and style, expression, and others.

Large language models (LLMs) require lengthy prompts as the input context to produce output aligned with user intentions, a process that incurs extra costs during inference. In this paper, we propose the Gist COnditioned deCOding (Gist-COCO) model, introducing a novel method for compressing prompts which also can assist the prompt interpretation and engineering. Gist-COCO employs an encoder-decoder based language model and then incorporates an additional encoder as a plugin module to compress prompts with inputs using gist tokens. It finetunes the compression plugin module and uses the representations of gist tokens to emulate the raw prompts in the vanilla language model. By verbalizing the representations of gist tokens into gist prompts, the compression ability of Gist-COCO can be generalized to different LLMs with high compression rates. Our experiments demonstrate that Gist-COCO outperforms previous prompt compression models in both passage and instruction compression tasks. Further analysis on gist verbalization results suggests that our gist prompts serve different functions in aiding language models. They may directly provide potential answers, generate the chain-of-thought, or simply repeat the inputs. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/Gist-COCO .

Since the emergence of large language models, prompt learning has become a popular method for optimizing and customizing these models. Special prompts, such as Chain-of-Thought, have even revealed previously unknown reasoning capabilities within these models. However, the progress of discovering effective prompts has been slow, driving a desire for general prompt optimization methods. Unfortunately, few existing prompt learning methods satisfy the criteria of being truly "general", i.e., automatic, discrete, black-box, gradient-free, and interpretable all at once. In this paper, we introduce metaheuristics, a branch of discrete non-convex optimization methods with over 100 options, as a promising approach to prompt learning. Within our paradigm, we test six typical methods: hill climbing, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms with/without crossover, tabu search, and harmony search, demonstrating their effectiveness in black-box prompt learning and Chain-of-Thought prompt tuning. Furthermore, we show that these methods can be used to discover more human-understandable prompts that were previously unknown, opening the door to a cornucopia of possibilities in prompt optimization. We release all the codes in https://github.com/research4pan/Plum.

Soft prompt tuning is a widely studied parameter-efficient fine-tuning method. However, it has a clear drawback: many soft tokens must be inserted into the input sequences to guarantee downstream performance. As a result, soft prompt tuning is less considered than Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) in the large language modeling (LLM) era. In this work, we propose a novel prompt tuning method, Instruction-Aware Prompt Tuning (IAPT), that requires only four soft tokens. First, we install a parameter-efficient soft prompt generator at each Transformer layer to generate idiosyncratic soft prompts for each input instruction. The generated soft prompts can be seen as a semantic summary of the input instructions and can effectively guide the output generation. Second, the soft prompt generators are modules with a bottleneck architecture consisting of a self-attention pooling operation, two linear projections, and an activation function. Pilot experiments show that prompt generators at different Transformer layers require different activation functions. Thus, we propose to learn the idiosyncratic activation functions for prompt generators automatically with the help of rational functions. We have conducted experiments on various tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that (a) our IAPT method can outperform the recent baselines with comparable tunable parameters. (b) Our IAPT method is more efficient than LoRA under the single-backbone multi-tenant setting.

Large language models (LLMs) showcase increasingly impressive English benchmark scores, however their performance profiles remain inconsistent across multilingual settings. To address this gap, we introduce PolyPrompt, a novel, parameter-efficient framework for enhancing the multilingual capabilities of LLMs. Our method learns a set of trigger tokens for each language through a gradient-based search, identifying the input query's language and selecting the corresponding trigger tokens which are prepended to the prompt during inference. We perform experiments on two ~1 billion parameter models, with evaluations on the global MMLU benchmark across fifteen typologically and resource diverse languages, demonstrating accuracy gains of 3.7%-19.9% compared to naive and translation-pipeline baselines.

Prompt Tuning is emerging as a scalable and cost-effective method to fine-tune Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), which are often referred to as Large Language Models (LLMs). This study benchmarks the performance and computational efficiency of Prompt Tuning and baselines for multi-label text classification. This is applied to the challenging task of classifying companies into an investment firm's proprietary industry taxonomy, supporting their thematic investment strategy. Text-to-text classification is frequently reported to outperform task-specific classification heads, but has several limitations when applied to a multi-label classification problem where each label consists of multiple tokens: (a) Generated labels may not match any label in the label taxonomy; (b) The fine-tuning process lacks permutation invariance and is sensitive to the order of the provided labels; (c) The model provides binary decisions rather than appropriate confidence scores. Limitation (a) is addressed by applying constrained decoding using Trie Search, which slightly improves classification performance. All limitations (a), (b), and (c) are addressed by replacing the PLM's language head with a classification head, which is referred to as Prompt Tuned Embedding Classification (PTEC). This improves performance significantly, while also reducing computational costs during inference. In our industrial application, the training data is skewed towards well-known companies. We confirm that the model's performance is consistent across both well-known and less-known companies. Our overall results indicate the continuing need to adapt state-of-the-art methods to domain-specific tasks, even in the era of PLMs with strong generalization abilities. We release our codebase and a benchmarking dataset at https://github.com/EQTPartners/PTEC.

The emergence of text-to-image synthesis (TIS) models has significantly influenced digital image creation by producing high-quality visuals from written descriptions. Yet these models heavily rely on the quality and specificity of textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users who may not be familiar with TIS-model-preferred prompt writing. Existing solutions relieve this via automatic model-preferred prompt generation from user queries. However, this single-turn manner suffers from limited user-centricity in terms of result interpretability and user interactivity. To address these issues, we propose DialPrompt, a multi-turn dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasises user-centricity. DialPrompt is designed to follow a multi-turn guidance workflow, where in each round of dialogue the model queries user with their preferences on possible optimization dimensions before generating the final TIS prompt. To achieve this, we mined 15 essential dimensions for high-quality prompts from advanced users and curated a multi-turn dataset. Through training on this dataset, DialPrompt can improve interpretability by allowing users to understand the correlation between specific phrases and image attributes. Additionally, it enables greater user control and engagement in the prompt generation process, leading to more personalized and visually satisfying outputs. Experiments indicate that DialPrompt achieves a competitive result in the quality of synthesized images, outperforming existing prompt engineering approaches by 5.7%. Furthermore, in our user evaluation, DialPrompt outperforms existing approaches by 46.5% in user-centricity score and is rated 7.9/10 by 19 human reviewers.

A number of tasks have been proposed recently to facilitate easy access to charts such as chart QA and summarization. The dominant paradigm to solve these tasks has been to fine-tune a pretrained model on the task data. However, this approach is not only expensive but also not generalizable to unseen tasks. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive generalization capabilities to unseen tasks with zero- or few-shot prompting. However, their application to chart-related tasks is not trivial as these tasks typically involve considering not only the underlying data but also the visual features in the chart image. We propose PromptChart, a multimodal few-shot prompting framework with LLMs for chart-related applications. By analyzing the tasks carefully, we have come up with a set of prompting guidelines for each task to elicit the best few-shot performance from LLMs. We further propose a strategy to inject visual information into the prompts. Our experiments on three different chart-related information consumption tasks show that with properly designed prompts LLMs can excel on the benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art.

The recent trend in the Large Vision and Language model has brought a new change in how information extraction systems are built. VLMs have set a new benchmark with their State-of-the-art techniques in understanding documents and building question-answering systems across various industries. They are significantly better at generating text from document images and providing accurate answers to questions. However, there are still some challenges in effectively utilizing these models to build a precise conversational system. General prompting techniques used with large language models are often not suitable for these specially designed vision language models. The output generated by such generic input prompts is ordinary and may contain information gaps when compared with the actual content of the document. To obtain more accurate and specific answers, a well-targeted prompt is required by the vision language model, along with the document image. In this paper, a technique is discussed called Target prompting, which focuses on explicitly targeting parts of document images and generating related answers from those specific regions only. The paper also covers the evaluation of response for each prompting technique using different user queries and input prompts.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances coding tasks by incorporating retrieved code examples into prompts. However, lengthy prompts, often exceeding tens of thousands of tokens, introduce challenges related to limited context windows of language models (LMs) and high computational costs. Existing prompt compression techniques focus on natural language, lacking tailored solutions for code. To address the gap, we propose CodePromptZip, a framework that compresses code examples before integrating into RAG workflows. Our framework employs a type-aware, priority-driven strategy to construct training samples for training code compression model. By using program analysis, we identify token types (e.g., Identifier) and perform ablation analysis to rank their removal priorities based on their impact on task performance. We then train a small LM as the compressor on these samples, enabling flexible compression conditioned on specified ratios while minimizing performance degradation. Specially, the compressor is augmented with a copy mechanism, allowing tokens to be directly copied from the original code snippets. Evaluation results show that CodePromptZip surpasses SOTA entropy-based and distillation-based baselines, improving by 23.4%, 28.7%, and 8.7% over the best baseline for Assertion Generation, Bugs2Fix, and Code Suggestion, respectively.

Although applications involving long-context inputs are crucial for the effective utilization of large language models (LLMs), they also result in increased computational costs and reduced performance. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient, training-free prompt compression method that retains key information within compressed prompts. We identify specific attention heads in transformer-based LLMs, which we designate as evaluator heads, that are capable of selecting tokens in long inputs that are most significant for inference. Building on this discovery, we develop EHPC, an Evaluator Head-based Prompt Compression method, which enables LLMs to rapidly "skim through" input prompts by leveraging only the first few layers with evaluator heads during the pre-filling stage, subsequently passing only the important tokens to the model for inference. EHPC achieves state-of-the-art results across two mainstream benchmarks: prompt compression and long-context inference acceleration. Consequently, it effectively reduces the complexity and costs associated with commercial API calls. We further demonstrate that EHPC attains competitive results compared to key-value cache-based acceleration methods, thereby highlighting its potential to enhance the efficiency of LLMs for long-context tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) enable a new ecosystem with many downstream applications, called LLM applications, with different natural language processing tasks. The functionality and performance of an LLM application highly depend on its system prompt, which instructs the backend LLM on what task to perform. Therefore, an LLM application developer often keeps a system prompt confidential to protect its intellectual property. As a result, a natural attack, called prompt leaking, is to steal the system prompt from an LLM application, which compromises the developer's intellectual property. Existing prompt leaking attacks primarily rely on manually crafted queries, and thus achieve limited effectiveness. In this paper, we design a novel, closed-box prompt leaking attack framework, called PLeak, to optimize an adversarial query such that when the attacker sends it to a target LLM application, its response reveals its own system prompt. We formulate finding such an adversarial query as an optimization problem and solve it with a gradient-based method approximately. Our key idea is to break down the optimization goal by optimizing adversary queries for system prompts incrementally, i.e., starting from the first few tokens of each system prompt step by step until the entire length of the system prompt. We evaluate PLeak in both offline settings and for real-world LLM applications, e.g., those on Poe, a popular platform hosting such applications. Our results show that PLeak can effectively leak system prompts and significantly outperforms not only baselines that manually curate queries but also baselines with optimized queries that are modified and adapted from existing jailbreaking attacks. We responsibly reported the issues to Poe and are still waiting for their response. Our implementation is available at this repository: https://github.com/BHui97/PLeak.

Vision-language models such as CLIP learn a generic text-image embedding from large-scale training data. A vision-language model can be adapted to a new classification task through few-shot prompt tuning. We find that such a prompt tuning process is highly robust to label noises. This intrigues us to study the key reasons contributing to the robustness of the prompt tuning paradigm. We conducted extensive experiments to explore this property and find the key factors are: 1) the fixed classname tokens provide a strong regularization to the optimization of the model, reducing gradients induced by the noisy samples; 2) the powerful pre-trained image-text embedding that is learned from diverse and generic web data provides strong prior knowledge for image classification. Further, we demonstrate that noisy zero-shot predictions from CLIP can be used to tune its own prompt, significantly enhancing prediction accuracy in the unsupervised setting. The code is available at https://github.com/CEWu/PTNL.

Prompt learning with immensely large Casual Language Models (CLMs) has been shown promising for attribute-controllable text generation (CTG). However, vanilla prompt tuning tends to imitate training corpus characteristics beyond the control attributes, resulting in a poor generalization ability. Moreover, it is less able to capture the relationship between different attributes, further limiting the control performance. In this paper, we propose a new CTG approach, namely DisCup, which incorporates the attribute knowledge of discriminator to optimize the control-prompts, steering a frozen CLM to produce attribute-specific texts. Specifically, the frozen CLM model, capable of producing multitudinous texts, is first used to generate the next-token candidates based on the context, so as to ensure the diversity of tokens to be predicted. Then, we leverage an attribute-discriminator to select desired/undesired tokens from those candidates, providing the inter-attribute knowledge. Finally, we bridge the above two traits by an unlikelihood objective for prompt-tuning. Extensive experimental results show that DisCup can achieve a new state-of-the-art control performance while maintaining an efficient and high-quality text generation, only relying on around 10 virtual tokens.

Extensive knowledge graphs (KGs) have been constructed to facilitate knowledge-driven tasks across various scenarios. However, existing work usually develops separate reasoning models for different KGs, lacking the ability to generalize and transfer knowledge across diverse KGs and reasoning settings. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based KG foundation model via in-context learning, namely KG-ICL, to achieve a universal reasoning ability. Specifically, we introduce a prompt graph centered with a query-related example fact as context to understand the query relation. To encode prompt graphs with the generalization ability to unseen entities and relations in queries, we first propose a unified tokenizer that maps entities and relations in prompt graphs to predefined tokens. Then, we propose two message passing neural networks to perform prompt encoding and KG reasoning, respectively. We conduct evaluation on 43 different KGs in both transductive and inductive settings. Results indicate that the proposed KG-ICL outperforms baselines on most datasets, showcasing its outstanding generalization and universal reasoning capabilities. The source code is accessible on GitHub: https://github.com/nju-websoft/KG-ICL.

Automatic International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding aims to assign multiple ICD codes to a medical note with average length of 3,000+ tokens. This task is challenging due to a high-dimensional space of multi-label assignment (tens of thousands of ICD codes) and the long-tail challenge: only a few codes (common diseases) are frequently assigned while most codes (rare diseases) are infrequently assigned. This study addresses the long-tail challenge by adapting a prompt-based fine-tuning technique with label semantics, which has been shown to be effective under few-shot setting. To further enhance the performance in medical domain, we propose a knowledge-enhanced longformer by injecting three domain-specific knowledge: hierarchy, synonym, and abbreviation with additional pretraining using contrastive learning. Experiments on MIMIC-III-full, a benchmark dataset of code assignment, show that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art method in 14.5% in marco F1 (from 10.3 to 11.8, P<0.001). To further test our model on few-shot setting, we created a new rare diseases coding dataset, MIMIC-III-rare50, on which our model improves marco F1 from 17.1 to 30.4 and micro F1 from 17.2 to 32.6 compared to previous method.

Long context inference presents challenges at the system level with increased compute and memory requirements, as well as from an accuracy perspective in being able to reason over long contexts. Recently, several methods have been proposed to compress the prompt to reduce the context length. However, there has been little work on comparing the different proposed methods across different tasks through a standardized analysis. This has led to conflicting results. To address this, here we perform a comprehensive characterization and evaluation of different prompt compression methods. In particular, we analyze extractive compression, summarization-based abstractive compression, and token pruning methods. Surprisingly, we find that extractive compression often outperforms all the other approaches, and enables up to 10x compression with minimal accuracy degradation. Interestingly, we also find that despite several recent claims, token pruning methods often lag behind extractive compression. We only found marginal improvements on summarization tasks.

In long context scenarios, large language models (LLMs) face three main challenges: higher computational/financial cost, longer latency, and inferior performance. Some studies reveal that the performance of LLMs depends on both the density and the position of the key information (question relevant) in the input prompt. Inspired by these findings, we propose LongLLMLingua for prompt compression towards improving LLMs' perception of the key information to simultaneously address the three challenges. We conduct evaluation on a wide range of long context scenarios including single-/multi-document QA, few-shot learning, summarization, synthetic tasks, and code completion. The experimental results show that LongLLMLingua compressed prompt can derive higher performance with much less cost. The latency of the end-to-end system is also reduced. For example, on NaturalQuestions benchmark, LongLLMLingua gains a performance boost of up to 17.1% over the original prompt with ~4x fewer tokens as input to GPT-3.5-Turbo. It can derive cost savings of \28.5 and 27.4 per 1,000 samples from the LongBench and ZeroScrolls benchmark, respectively. Additionally, when compressing prompts of ~10k tokens at a compression rate of 2x-10x, LongLLMLingua can speed up the end-to-end latency by 1.4x-3.8x. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/LLMLingua.

Prompting is the primary way to utilize the multitask capabilities of language models (LMs), but prompts occupy valuable space in the input context window, and repeatedly encoding the same prompt is computationally inefficient. Finetuning and distillation methods allow for specialization of LMs without prompting, but require retraining the model for each task. To avoid this trade-off entirely, we present gisting, which trains an LM to compress prompts into smaller sets of "gist" tokens which can be cached and reused for compute efficiency. Gist models can be trained with no additional cost over standard instruction finetuning by simply modifying Transformer attention masks to encourage prompt compression. On decoder (LLaMA-7B) and encoder-decoder (FLAN-T5-XXL) LMs, gisting enables up to 26x compression of prompts, resulting in up to 40% FLOPs reductions, 4.2% wall time speedups, and storage savings, all with minimal loss in output quality.

In recent years, prompt tuning has proven effective in adapting pre-trained vision-language models to downstream tasks. These methods aim to adapt the pre-trained models by introducing learnable prompts while keeping pre-trained weights frozen. However, learnable prompts can affect the internal representation within the self-attention module, which may negatively impact performance variance and generalization, especially in data-deficient settings. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, Read-only Prompt Optimization (RPO). RPO leverages masked attention to prevent the internal representation shift in the pre-trained model. Further, to facilitate the optimization of RPO, the read-only prompts are initialized based on special tokens of the pre-trained model. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that RPO outperforms CLIP and CoCoOp in base-to-new generalization and domain generalization while displaying better robustness. Also, the proposed method achieves better generalization on extremely data-deficient settings, while improving parameter efficiency and computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/RPO.

Transformers have emerged as the underpinning architecture for Large Language Models (LLMs). In generative language models, the inference process involves two primary phases: prompt processing and token generation. Token generation, which constitutes the majority of the computational workload, primarily entails vector-matrix multiplications and interactions with the Key-Value (KV) Cache. This phase is constrained by memory bandwidth due to the overhead of transferring weights and KV cache values from the memory system to the computing units. This memory bottleneck becomes particularly pronounced in applications that require long-context and extensive text generation, both of which are increasingly crucial for LLMs. This paper introduces "Keyformer", an innovative inference-time approach, to mitigate the challenges associated with KV cache size and memory bandwidth utilization. Keyformer leverages the observation that approximately 90% of the attention weight in generative inference focuses on a specific subset of tokens, referred to as "key" tokens. Keyformer retains only the key tokens in the KV cache by identifying these crucial tokens using a novel score function. This approach effectively reduces both the KV cache size and memory bandwidth usage without compromising model accuracy. We evaluate Keyformer's performance across three foundational models: GPT-J, Cerebras-GPT, and MPT, which employ various positional embedding algorithms. Our assessment encompasses a variety of tasks, with a particular emphasis on summarization and conversation tasks involving extended contexts. Keyformer's reduction of KV cache reduces inference latency by 2.1x and improves token generation throughput by 2.4x, while preserving the model's accuracy.

Prompt learning has emerged as an efficient and effective approach for transferring foundational Vision-Language Models (e.g., CLIP) to downstream tasks. However, current methods tend to overfit to seen categories, thereby limiting their generalization ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a new method, Decoupled Prompt Learning (DPL), which reformulates the attention in prompt learning to alleviate this problem. Specifically, we theoretically investigate the collaborative process between prompts and instances (i.e., image patches/text tokens) by reformulating the original self-attention into four separate sub-processes. Through detailed analysis, we observe that certain sub-processes can be strengthened to bolster robustness and generalizability by some approximation techniques. Furthermore, we introduce language-conditioned textual prompting based on decoupled attention to naturally preserve the generalization of text input. Our approach is flexible for both visual and textual modalities, making it easily extendable to multi-modal prompt learning. By combining the proposed techniques, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on three representative benchmarks encompassing 15 image recognition datasets, while maintaining parameter-efficient. Moreover, our DPL does not rely on any auxiliary regularization task or extra training data, further demonstrating its remarkable generalization ability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to generating harmful content when prompted with carefully crafted inputs, a vulnerability known as LLM jailbreaking. As LLMs become more powerful, studying jailbreak methods is critical to enhancing security and aligning models with human values. Traditionally, jailbreak techniques have relied on suffix addition or prompt templates, but these methods suffer from limited attack diversity. This paper introduces DiffusionAttacker, an end-to-end generative approach for jailbreak rewriting inspired by diffusion models. Our method employs a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) text diffusion model as a generator, conditioning on the original prompt and guiding the denoising process with a novel attack loss. Unlike previous approaches that use autoregressive LLMs to generate jailbreak prompts, which limit the modification of already generated tokens and restrict the rewriting space, DiffusionAttacker utilizes a seq2seq diffusion model, allowing more flexible token modifications. This approach preserves the semantic content of the original prompt while producing harmful content. Additionally, we leverage the Gumbel-Softmax technique to make the sampling process from the diffusion model's output distribution differentiable, eliminating the need for iterative token search. Extensive experiments on Advbench and Harmbench demonstrate that DiffusionAttacker outperforms previous methods across various evaluation metrics, including attack success rate (ASR), fluency, and diversity.

Facial personalization represents a crucial downstream task in the domain of text-to-image generation. To preserve identity fidelity while ensuring alignment with user-defined prompts, current mainstream frameworks for facial personalization predominantly employ identity embedding mechanisms to associate identity information with textual embeddings. However, our experiments show that identity embeddings compromise the effectiveness of other tokens within the prompt, thereby hindering high prompt consistency, particularly when prompts involve multiple facial attributes. Moreover, previous works overlook the fact that their corresponding foundation models hold great potential to generate faces aligning to prompts well and can be easily leveraged to cure these ill-aligned attributes in personalized models. Building upon these insights, we propose FreeCure, a training-free framework that harnesses the intrinsic knowledge from the foundation models themselves to improve the prompt consistency of personalization models. First, by extracting cross-attention and semantic maps from the denoising process of foundation models, we identify easily localized attributes (e.g., hair, accessories, etc). Second, we enhance multiple attributes in the outputs of personalization models through a novel noise-blending strategy coupled with an inversion-based process. Our approach offers several advantages: it eliminates the need for training; it effectively facilitates the enhancement for a wide array of facial attributes in a non-intrusive manner; and it can be seamlessly integrated into existing popular personalization models. FreeCure has demonstrated significant improvements in prompt consistency across a diverse set of state-of-the-art facial personalization models while maintaining the integrity of original identity fidelity.

In the realm of image generation, creating customized images from visual prompt with additional textual instruction emerges as a promising endeavor. However, existing methods, both tuning-based and tuning-free, struggle with interpreting the subject-essential attributes from the visual prompt. This leads to subject-irrelevant attributes infiltrating the generation process, ultimately compromising the personalization quality in both editability and ID preservation. In this paper, we present DisEnvisioner, a novel approach for effectively extracting and enriching the subject-essential features while filtering out -irrelevant information, enabling exceptional customization performance, in a tuning-free manner and using only a single image. Specifically, the feature of the subject and other irrelevant components are effectively separated into distinctive visual tokens, enabling a much more accurate customization. Aiming to further improving the ID consistency, we enrich the disentangled features, sculpting them into more granular representations. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods in instruction response (editability), ID consistency, inference speed, and the overall image quality, highlighting the effectiveness and efficiency of DisEnvisioner. Project page: https://disenvisioner.github.io/.

We consider the problem of customizing text-to-image diffusion models with user-supplied reference images. Given new prompts, the existing methods can capture the key concept from the reference images but fail to align the generated image with the prompt. In this work, we seek to address this key issue by proposing new methods that can easily be used in conjunction with existing customization methods that optimize the embeddings/weights at various intermediate stages of the text encoding process. The first contribution of this paper is a dissection of the various stages of the text encoding process leading up to the conditioning vector for text-to-image models. We take a holistic view of existing customization methods and notice that key and value outputs from this process differs substantially from their corresponding baseline (non-customized) models (e.g., baseline stable diffusion). While this difference does not impact the concept being customized, it leads to other parts of the generated image not being aligned with the prompt. Further, we also observe that these keys and values allow independent control various aspects of the final generation, enabling semantic manipulation of the output. Taken together, the features spanning these keys and values, serve as the basis for our next contribution where we fix the aforementioned issues with existing methods. We propose a new post-processing algorithm, AlignIT, that infuses the keys and values for the concept of interest while ensuring the keys and values for all other tokens in the input prompt are unchanged. Our proposed method can be plugged in directly to existing customization methods, leading to a substantial performance improvement in the alignment of the final result with the input prompt while retaining the customization quality.

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), it has become a significant concern to ensure their safety and prevent harmful responses. While current safe-alignment methods based on instruction fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) can effectively reduce harmful responses from LLMs, they often require high-quality datasets and heavy computational overhead during model training. Another way to align language models is to modify the logit of tokens in model outputs without heavy training. Recent studies have shown that contrastive decoding can enhance the performance of language models by reducing the likelihood of confused tokens. However, these methods require the manual selection of contrastive models or instruction templates. To this end, we propose Adversarial Contrastive Decoding (ACD), an optimization-based framework to generate two opposite system prompts for prompt-based contrastive decoding. ACD only needs to apply a lightweight prompt tuning on a rather small anchor dataset (< 3 min for each model) without training the target model. Experiments conducted on extensive models and benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves much better safety performance than previous model training-free decoding methods without sacrificing its original generation ability.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to proactively elicit user preference and recommend high-quality items through natural language conversations. Typically, a CRS consists of a recommendation module to predict preferred items for users and a conversation module to generate appropriate responses. To develop an effective CRS, it is essential to seamlessly integrate the two modules. Existing works either design semantic alignment strategies, or share knowledge resources and representations between the two modules. However, these approaches still rely on different architectures or techniques to develop the two modules, making it difficult for effective module integration. To address this problem, we propose a unified CRS model named UniCRS based on knowledge-enhanced prompt learning. Our approach unifies the recommendation and conversation subtasks into the prompt learning paradigm, and utilizes knowledge-enhanced prompts based on a fixed pre-trained language model (PLM) to fulfill both subtasks in a unified approach. In the prompt design, we include fused knowledge representations, task-specific soft tokens, and the dialogue context, which can provide sufficient contextual information to adapt the PLM for the CRS task. Besides, for the recommendation subtask, we also incorporate the generated response template as an important part of the prompt, to enhance the information interaction between the two subtasks. Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

Large pre-trained vision-language models such as CLIP have demonstrated great potential in zero-shot transferability to downstream tasks. However, to attain optimal performance, the manual selection of prompts is necessary to improve alignment between the downstream image distribution and the textual class descriptions. This manual prompt engineering is the major challenge for deploying such models in practice since it requires domain expertise and is extremely time-consuming. To avoid non-trivial prompt engineering, recent work Context Optimization (CoOp) introduced the concept of prompt learning to the vision domain using learnable textual tokens. While CoOp can achieve substantial improvements over manual prompts, its learned context is worse generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset. In this work, we present Prompt Learning with Reparameterization Encoder (PRE) - a simple and efficient method that enhances the generalization ability of the learnable prompt to unseen classes while maintaining the capacity to learn Base classes. Instead of directly optimizing the prompts, PRE employs a prompt encoder to reparameterize the input prompt embeddings, enhancing the exploration of task-specific knowledge from few-shot samples. Experiments and extensive ablation studies on 8 benchmarks demonstrate that our approach is an efficient method for prompt learning. Specifically, PRE achieves a notable enhancement of 5.60% in average accuracy on New classes and 3% in Harmonic mean compared to CoOp in the 16-shot setting, all achieved within a good training time.

Pretrained language models can be effectively stimulated by textual prompts or demonstrations, especially in low-data scenarios. Recent works have focused on automatically searching discrete or continuous prompts or optimized verbalizers, yet studies for the demonstration are still limited. Concretely, the demonstration examples are crucial for an excellent final performance of prompt-tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named contrastive demonstration tuning, which is free of demonstration sampling. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be: (i) Plugged into any previous prompt-tuning approaches; (ii) Extended to widespread classification tasks with a large number of categories. Experimental results on 16 datasets illustrate that our method integrated with previous approaches LM-BFF and P-tuning can yield better performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/research/Demo-Tuning.

Text-to-image generation has advanced rapidly, yet aligning complex textual prompts with generated visuals remains challenging, especially with intricate object relationships and fine-grained details. This paper introduces Fast Prompt Alignment (FPA), a prompt optimization framework that leverages a one-pass approach, enhancing text-to-image alignment efficiency without the iterative overhead typical of current methods like OPT2I. FPA uses large language models (LLMs) for single-iteration prompt paraphrasing, followed by fine-tuning or in-context learning with optimized prompts to enable real-time inference, reducing computational demands while preserving alignment fidelity. Extensive evaluations on the COCO Captions and PartiPrompts datasets demonstrate that FPA achieves competitive text-image alignment scores at a fraction of the processing time, as validated through both automated metrics (TIFA, VQA) and human evaluation. A human study with expert annotators further reveals a strong correlation between human alignment judgments and automated scores, underscoring the robustness of FPA's improvements. The proposed method showcases a scalable, efficient alternative to iterative prompt optimization, enabling broader applicability in real-time, high-demand settings. The codebase is provided to facilitate further research: https://github.com/tiktok/fast_prompt_alignment

Prompt engineering is crucial for deploying LLMs but is poorly understood mathematically. We formalize LLM systems as a class of discrete stochastic dynamical systems to explore prompt engineering through the lens of control theory. We investigate the reachable set of output token sequences R_y(mathbf x_0) for which there exists a control input sequence mathbf u for each mathbf y in R_y(mathbf x_0) that steers the LLM to output mathbf y from initial state sequence mathbf x_0. We offer analytic analysis on the limitations on the controllability of self-attention in terms of reachable set, where we prove an upper bound on the reachable set of outputs R_y(mathbf x_0) as a function of the singular values of the parameter matrices. We present complementary empirical analysis on the controllability of a panel of LLMs, including Falcon-7b, Llama-7b, and Falcon-40b. Our results demonstrate a lower bound on the reachable set of outputs R_y(mathbf x_0) w.r.t. initial state sequences mathbf x_0 sampled from the Wikitext dataset. We find that the correct next Wikitext token following sequence mathbf x_0 is reachable over 97% of the time with prompts of kleq 10 tokens. We also establish that the top 75 most likely next tokens, as estimated by the LLM itself, are reachable at least 85% of the time with prompts of kleq 10 tokens. Intriguingly, short prompt sequences can dramatically alter the likelihood of specific outputs, even making the least likely tokens become the most likely ones. This control-centric analysis of LLMs demonstrates the significant and poorly understood role of input sequences in steering output probabilities, offering a foundational perspective for enhancing language model system capabilities.

Text-to-Image (T2I) models often suffer from issues such as semantic leakage, incorrect feature binding, and omissions of key concepts in the generated image. This work studies these phenomena by looking into the role of information flow between textual token representations. To this end, we generate images by applying the diffusion component on a subset of contextual token representations in a given prompt and observe several interesting phenomena. First, in many cases, a word or multiword expression is fully represented by one or two tokens, while other tokens are redundant. For example, in "San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge", the token "gate" alone captures the full expression. We demonstrate the redundancy of these tokens by removing them after textual encoding and generating an image from the resulting representation. Surprisingly, we find that this process not only maintains image generation performance but also reduces errors by 21\% compared to standard generation. We then show that information can also flow between different expressions in a sentence, which often leads to semantic leakage. Based on this observation, we propose a simple, training-free method to mitigate semantic leakage: replacing the leaked item's representation after the textual encoding with its uncontextualized representation. Remarkably, this simple approach reduces semantic leakage by 85\%. Overall, our work provides a comprehensive analysis of information flow across textual tokens in T2I models, offering both novel insights and practical benefits.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide range of natural language processing tasks when leveraging in-context learning. To mitigate the additional computational and financial costs associated with in-context learning, several prompt compression methods have been proposed to compress the in-context learning prompts. Despite their success, these methods face challenges with transferability due to model-specific compression, or rely on external training data, such as GPT-4. In this paper, we investigate the ability of LLMs to develop a unified compression method that discretizes uninformative tokens, utilizing a self-supervised pre-training technique. By introducing a small number of parameters during the continual pre-training, the proposed Selection-p produces a probability for each input token, indicating whether to preserve or discard it. Experiments show Selection-p achieves state-of-the-art performance across numerous classification tasks, achieving compression rates of up to 10 times while experiencing only a marginal 0.8% decrease in performance. Moreover, it exhibits superior transferability to different models compared to prior work. Additionally, we further analyze how Selection-p helps maintain performance on in-context learning with long contexts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in various scenarios. However, they suffer from much redundant information and tend to be lost in the middle in long context scenarios, leading to inferior performance. To address these challenges, we present Perception Compressor, a training-free prompt compression method. It includes a dual-slope ratio allocator to dynamically assign compression ratios and open-book ratios, a perception retriever that leverages guiding questions and instruction to retrieve the most relevant demonstrations, and a semi-guided iterative compression that retains key information at the token level while removing tokens that distract the LLM. We conduct extensive experiments on long context benchmarks, i.e., NaturalQuestions, LongBench, and MuSiQue. Experiment results show that Perception Compressor outperforms existing methods by a large margin, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

This paper demonstrates how OpenAI's ChatGPT can be used in a few-shot setting to convert natural language instructions into a sequence of executable robot actions. The paper proposes easy-to-customize input prompts for ChatGPT that meet common requirements in practical applications, such as easy integration with robot execution systems and applicability to various environments while minimizing the impact of ChatGPT's token limit. The prompts encourage ChatGPT to output a sequence of predefined robot actions, represent the operating environment in a formalized style, and infer the updated state of the operating environment. Experiments confirmed that the proposed prompts enable ChatGPT to act according to requirements in various environments, and users can adjust ChatGPT's output with natural language feedback for safe and robust operation. The proposed prompts and source code are open-source and publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/ChatGPT-Robot-Manipulation-Prompts

Natural-language prompts have recently been used to coax pretrained language models into performing other AI tasks, using a fill-in-the-blank paradigm (Petroni et al., 2019) or a few-shot extrapolation paradigm (Brown et al., 2020). For example, language models retain factual knowledge from their training corpora that can be extracted by asking them to "fill in the blank" in a sentential prompt. However, where does this prompt come from? We explore the idea of learning prompts by gradient descent -- either fine-tuning prompts taken from previous work, or starting from random initialization. Our prompts consist of "soft words," i.e., continuous vectors that are not necessarily word type embeddings from the language model. Furthermore, for each task, we optimize a mixture of prompts, learning which prompts are most effective and how to ensemble them. Across multiple English LMs and tasks, our approach hugely outperforms previous methods, showing that the implicit factual knowledge in language models was previously underestimated. Moreover, this knowledge is cheap to elicit: random initialization is nearly as good as informed initialization.

We introduce SPEAR-TTS, a multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) system that can be trained with minimal supervision. By combining two types of discrete speech representations, we cast TTS as a composition of two sequence-to-sequence tasks: from text to high-level semantic tokens (akin to "reading") and from semantic tokens to low-level acoustic tokens ("speaking"). Decoupling these two tasks enables training of the "speaking" module using abundant audio-only data, and unlocks the highly efficient combination of pretraining and backtranslation to reduce the need for parallel data when training the "reading" component. To control the speaker identity, we adopt example prompting, which allows SPEAR-TTS to generalize to unseen speakers using only a short sample of 3 seconds, without any explicit speaker representation or speaker-id labels. Our experiments demonstrate that SPEAR-TTS achieves a character error rate that is competitive with state-of-the-art methods using only 15 minutes of parallel data, while matching ground-truth speech in terms of naturalness and acoustic quality, as measured in subjective tests.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of fine-tuning them with RL in a specific environment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to analyze the sensitivity of LLMs to prompt formulations following RL training in a textual environment. Our findings reveal that the performance of LLMs degrades when faced with prompt formulations different from those used during the RL training phase. Besides, we analyze the source of this sensitivity by examining the model's internal representations and salient tokens. Finally, we propose to use a contrastive loss to mitigate this sensitivity and improve the robustness and generalization capabilities of LLMs.

Recent advances in text-to-image personalization have enabled high-quality and controllable image synthesis for user-provided concepts. However, existing methods still struggle to balance identity preservation with text alignment. Our approach is based on the fact that generating prompt-aligned images requires a precise semantic understanding of the prompt, which involves accurately processing the interactions between the new concept and its surrounding context tokens within the CLIP text encoder. To address this, we aim to embed the new concept properly into the input embedding space of the text encoder, allowing for seamless integration with existing tokens. We introduce Context Regularization (CoRe), which enhances the learning of the new concept's text embedding by regularizing its context tokens in the prompt. This is based on the insight that appropriate output vectors of the text encoder for the context tokens can only be achieved if the new concept's text embedding is correctly learned. CoRe can be applied to arbitrary prompts without requiring the generation of corresponding images, thus improving the generalization of the learned text embedding. Additionally, CoRe can serve as a test-time optimization technique to further enhance the generations for specific prompts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms several baseline methods in both identity preservation and text alignment. Code will be made publicly available.

As powerful pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP gain prominence, numerous studies have attempted to combine VLMs for downstream tasks. Among these, prompt learning has been validated as an effective method for adapting to new tasks, which only requiring a small number of parameters. However, current prompt learning methods face two challenges: first, a single soft prompt struggles to capture the diverse styles and patterns within a dataset; second, fine-tuning soft prompts is prone to overfitting. To address these challenges, we propose a mixture of soft prompt learning method incorporating a routing module. This module is able to capture a dataset's varied styles and dynamically selects the most suitable prompts for each instance. Additionally, we introduce a novel gating mechanism to ensure the router selects prompts based on their similarity to hard prompt templates, which both retaining knowledge from hard prompts and improving selection accuracy. We also implement semantically grouped text-level supervision, initializing each soft prompt with the token embeddings of manually designed templates from its group and applied a contrastive loss between the resulted text feature and hard prompt encoded text feature. This supervision ensures that the text features derived from soft prompts remain close to those from their corresponding hard prompts, preserving initial knowledge and mitigating overfitting. Our method has been validated on 11 datasets, demonstrating evident improvements in few-shot learning, domain generalization, and base-to-new generalization scenarios compared to existing baselines. The code will be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mocoop-6387

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on many different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Prompt engineering plays a key role in adding more to the already existing abilities of LLMs to achieve significant performance gains on various NLP tasks. Prompt engineering requires composing natural language instructions called prompts to elicit knowledge from LLMs in a structured way. Unlike previous state-of-the-art (SoTA) models, prompt engineering does not require extensive parameter re-training or fine-tuning based on the given NLP task and thus solely operates on the embedded knowledge of LLMs. Additionally, LLM enthusiasts can intelligently extract LLMs' knowledge through a basic natural language conversational exchange or prompt engineering, allowing more and more people even without deep mathematical machine learning background to experiment with LLMs. With prompt engineering gaining popularity in the last two years, researchers have come up with numerous engineering techniques around designing prompts to improve accuracy of information extraction from the LLMs. In this paper, we summarize different prompting techniques and club them together based on different NLP tasks that they have been used for. We further granularly highlight the performance of these prompting strategies on various datasets belonging to that NLP task, talk about the corresponding LLMs used, present a taxonomy diagram and discuss the possible SoTA for specific datasets. In total, we read and present a survey of 44 research papers which talk about 39 different prompting methods on 29 different NLP tasks of which most of them have been published in the last two years.

Prompt-based classifiers are an attractive approach for zero-shot classification. However, the precise choice of the prompt template and label words can largely influence performance, with semantically equivalent settings often showing notable performance difference. This discrepancy can be partly attributed to word biases, where the classifier may be biased towards classes. To address this problem, it is possible to optimise classification thresholds on a labelled data set, however, this mitigates some of the advantages of prompt-based classifiers. This paper instead approaches this problem by examining the expected marginal probabilities of the classes. Here, probabilities are reweighted to have a uniform prior over classes, in an unsupervised fashion. Further, we draw a theoretical connection between the class priors and the language models' word prior, and offer the ability to set a threshold in a zero-resource fashion. We show that matching class priors correlates strongly with the oracle upper bound performance and demonstrate large consistent performance gains for prompt settings over a range of NLP tasks.

Text-to-image generation models are powerful but difficult to use. Users craft specific prompts to get better images, though the images can be repetitive. This paper proposes a Prompt Expansion framework that helps users generate high-quality, diverse images with less effort. The Prompt Expansion model takes a text query as input and outputs a set of expanded text prompts that are optimized such that when passed to a text-to-image model, generates a wider variety of appealing images. We conduct a human evaluation study that shows that images generated through Prompt Expansion are more aesthetically pleasing and diverse than those generated by baseline methods. Overall, this paper presents a novel and effective approach to improving the text-to-image generation experience.

Speech conveys more information than just text, as the same word can be uttered in various voices to convey diverse information. Compared to traditional text-to-speech (TTS) methods relying on speech prompts (reference speech) for voice variability, using text prompts (descriptions) is more user-friendly since speech prompts can be hard to find or may not exist at all. TTS approaches based on the text prompt face two challenges: 1) the one-to-many problem, where not all details about voice variability can be described in the text prompt, and 2) the limited availability of text prompt datasets, where vendors and large cost of data labeling are required to write text prompt for speech. In this work, we introduce PromptTTS 2 to address these challenges with a variation network to provide variability information of voice not captured by text prompts, and a prompt generation pipeline to utilize the large language models (LLM) to compose high quality text prompts. Specifically, the variation network predicts the representation extracted from the reference speech (which contains full information about voice) based on the text prompt representation. For the prompt generation pipeline, it generates text prompts for speech with a speech understanding model to recognize voice attributes (e.g., gender, speed) from speech and a large language model to formulate text prompt based on the recognition results. Experiments on a large-scale (44K hours) speech dataset demonstrate that compared to the previous works, PromptTTS 2 generates voices more consistent with text prompts and supports the sampling of diverse voice variability, thereby offering users more choices on voice generation. Additionally, the prompt generation pipeline produces high-quality prompts, eliminating the large labeling cost. The demo page of PromptTTS 2 is available onlinehttps://speechresearch.github.io/prompttts2.

Today's image generation systems are capable of producing realistic and high-quality images. However, user prompts often contain ambiguities, making it difficult for these systems to interpret users' actual intentions. Consequently, many users must modify their prompts several times to ensure the generated images meet their expectations. While some methods focus on enhancing prompts to make the generated images fit user needs, the model is still hard to understand users' real needs, especially for non-expert users. In this research, we aim to enhance the visual parameter-tuning process, making the model user-friendly for individuals without specialized knowledge and better understand user needs. We propose a human-machine co-adaption strategy using mutual information between the user's prompts and the pictures under modification as the optimizing target to make the system better adapt to user needs. We find that an improved model can reduce the necessity for multiple rounds of adjustments. We also collect multi-round dialogue datasets with prompts and images pairs and user intent. Various experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in our proposed dataset. Our annotation tools and several examples of our dataset are available at https://zenodo.org/records/14876029 for easier review. We will make open source our full dataset and code.

The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is crucial to assess their performance and mitigate potential security risks. In this paper, we introduce PromptBench, a unified library to evaluate LLMs. It consists of several key components that are easily used and extended by researchers: prompt construction, prompt engineering, dataset and model loading, adversarial prompt attack, dynamic evaluation protocols, and analysis tools. PromptBench is designed to be an open, general, and flexible codebase for research purposes that can facilitate original study in creating new benchmarks, deploying downstream applications, and designing new evaluation protocols. The code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/promptbench and will be continuously supported.

Recent work finds that retrieval-augmented generation with large language models is prone to be influenced by the order of retrieved documents in the context. However, the lack of in-depth analysis limits the use of this phenomenon for prompt engineering in practice. In this study, we posit that likelihoods serve as an effective gauge for language model performance. Through experiments on two question-answering datasets with a variety of state-of-the-art language models, we reveal correlations between answer accuracy and the likelihood of the question at both the corpus level and the instance level. In addition, we find that question likelihood can also indicate the position of the task-relevant information in the context. Based on these findings, we propose two methods that use question likelihood as a gauge for selecting and constructing prompts that lead to better performance. We demonstrate their effectiveness with experiments. In addition, our likelihood-based methods are efficient, as they only need to compute the likelihood of the input, requiring much fewer language model passes than heuristic prompt engineering methods that require generating responses. Our analysis deepens our understanding of how input prompts affect model performance and provides a promising direction for efficient prompt optimization.

With the continuous development of pre-trained language models, prompt-based training becomes a well-adopted paradigm that drastically improves the exploitation of models for many natural language processing tasks. Prompting also shows great performance compared to traditional fine-tuning when adapted to zero-shot or few-shot scenarios where the number of annotated data is limited. In this framework, the role of verbalizers is essential, as an interpretation from masked word distributions into output predictions. In this work, we propose mave, an approach for verbalizer construction by enrichment of class labels using neighborhood relation in the embedding space of words for the text classification task. In addition, we elaborate a benchmarking procedure to evaluate typical baselines of verbalizers for document classification in few-shot learning contexts. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results while using significantly fewer resources. We show that our approach is particularly effective in cases with extremely limited supervision data.

This paper explores the use of open generative Large Language Models (LLMs) for annotation tasks in the social sciences. The study highlights the challenges associated with proprietary models, such as limited reproducibility and privacy concerns, and advocates for the adoption of open (source) models that can be operated on independent devices. Two examples of annotation tasks, sentiment analysis in tweets and identification of leisure activities in childhood aspirational essays are provided. The study evaluates the performance of different prompting strategies and models (neural-chat-7b-v3-2, Starling-LM-7B-alpha, openchat_3.5, zephyr-7b-alpha and zephyr-7b-beta). The results indicate the need for careful validation and tailored prompt engineering. The study highlights the advantages of open models for data privacy and reproducibility.

Recent research has highlighted the potential of LLM applications, like ChatGPT, for performing label annotation on social computing text. However, it is already well known that performance hinges on the quality of the input prompts. To address this, there has been a flurry of research into prompt tuning -- techniques and guidelines that attempt to improve the quality of prompts. Yet these largely rely on manual effort and prior knowledge of the dataset being annotated. To address this limitation, we propose APT-Pipe, an automated prompt-tuning pipeline. APT-Pipe aims to automatically tune prompts to enhance ChatGPT's text classification performance on any given dataset. We implement APT-Pipe and test it across twelve distinct text classification datasets. We find that prompts tuned by APT-Pipe help ChatGPT achieve higher weighted F1-score on nine out of twelve experimented datasets, with an improvement of 7.01% on average. We further highlight APT-Pipe's flexibility as a framework by showing how it can be extended to support additional tuning mechanisms.

Using a text description as prompt to guide the generation of text or images (e.g., GPT-3 or DALLE-2) has drawn wide attention recently. Beyond text and image generation, in this work, we explore the possibility of utilizing text descriptions to guide speech synthesis. Thus, we develop a text-to-speech (TTS) system (dubbed as PromptTTS) that takes a prompt with both style and content descriptions as input to synthesize the corresponding speech. Specifically, PromptTTS consists of a style encoder and a content encoder to extract the corresponding representations from the prompt, and a speech decoder to synthesize speech according to the extracted style and content representations. Compared with previous works in controllable TTS that require users to have acoustic knowledge to understand style factors such as prosody and pitch, PromptTTS is more user-friendly since text descriptions are a more natural way to express speech style (e.g., ''A lady whispers to her friend slowly''). Given that there is no TTS dataset with prompts, to benchmark the task of PromptTTS, we construct and release a dataset containing prompts with style and content information and the corresponding speech. Experiments show that PromptTTS can generate speech with precise style control and high speech quality. Audio samples and our dataset are publicly available.

Large language models have shown their ability to become effective few-shot learners with prompting, revoluting the paradigm of learning with data scarcity. However, this approach largely depends on the quality of prompt initialization, and always exhibits large variability among different runs. Such property makes prompt tuning highly unreliable and vulnerable to poorly constructed prompts, which limits its extension to more real-world applications. To tackle this issue, we propose to treat the hard prompt and soft prompt as separate inputs to mitigate noise brought by the prompt initialization. Furthermore, we optimize soft prompts with contrastive learning for utilizing class-aware information in the training process to maintain model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that \sysname outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7.20% in accuracy and reduces the standard deviation by 2.02 on average. Furthermore, extensive experiments underscore its robustness and stability across 7 datasets covering various tasks.

Prompt-based learning has shown considerable promise in reformulating various downstream tasks as cloze problems by combining original input with a predetermined template. This approach demonstrates its effectiveness, especially in few-shot learning scenarios, where the model is trained on a scarce amount of data. Despite its successes, the limited templates and text in few-shot prompt-based learning scenarios leave significant room for performance improvement. Moreover, existing methods sometimes resort to model ensembles, which, while effective, could potentially hamper model efficiency due to increased computational demands. To address these issues, we introduce MixPro, an augmentation method designed to augment both the vanilla input text and the templates. We implement this through the token-level, the sentence-level, and the template-level Mixup strategies. The experimental results on five few-shot datasets show that MixPro outperforms other augmentation baselines, improving model performance by an average of 5.08% compared to before augmentation.

Prompt engineering is a new paradigm for enhancing the performance of trained neural network models. For optimizing text-style prompts, existing methods usually individually operate small portions of a text step by step, which either breaks the fluency or could not globally adjust a prompt. Since large language models (LLMs) have powerful ability of generating coherent texts token by token, can we utilize LLMs for improving prompts? Based on this motivation, in this paper, considering a trained LLM as a text generator, we attempt to design a black-box evolution algorithm for automatically optimizing texts, namely SPELL (Semantic Prompt Evolution based on a LLM). The proposed method is evaluated with different LLMs and evolution parameters in different text tasks. Experimental results show that SPELL could rapidly improve the prompts indeed. We further explore the evolution process and discuss on the limitations, potential possibilities and future work.

We discover that DALLE-2 seems to have a hidden vocabulary that can be used to generate images with absurd prompts. For example, it seems that Apoploe vesrreaitais means birds and Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons (sometimes) means bugs or pests. We find that these prompts are often consistent in isolation but also sometimes in combinations. We present our black-box method to discover words that seem random but have some correspondence to visual concepts. This creates important security and interpretability challenges.

Research on prompting has shown excellent performance with little or even no supervised training across many tasks. However, prompting for machine translation is still under-explored in the literature. We fill this gap by offering a systematic study on prompting strategies for translation, examining various factors for prompt template and demonstration example selection. We further explore the use of monolingual data and the feasibility of cross-lingual, cross-domain, and sentence-to-document transfer learning in prompting. Extensive experiments with GLM-130B (Zeng et al., 2022) as the testbed show that 1) the number and the quality of prompt examples matter, where using suboptimal examples degenerates translation; 2) several features of prompt examples, such as semantic similarity, show significant Spearman correlation with their prompting performance; yet, none of the correlations are strong enough; 3) using pseudo parallel prompt examples constructed from monolingual data via zero-shot prompting could improve translation; and 4) improved performance is achievable by transferring knowledge from prompt examples selected in other settings. We finally provide an analysis on the model outputs and discuss several problems that prompting still suffers from.

As the ever-increasing token limits of large language models (LLMs) have enabled long context as input, prompting with single data samples might no longer an efficient way. A straightforward strategy improving efficiency is to batch data within the token limit (e.g., 8k for gpt-3.5-turbo; 32k for GPT-4), which we call BatchPrompt. We have two initial observations for prompting with batched data. First, we find that prompting with batched data in longer contexts will inevitably lead to worse performance, compared to single-data prompting. Second, the performance of the language model is significantly correlated with the positions and order of the batched data, due to the corresponding change in decoder context. To retain efficiency and overcome performance loss, we propose Batch Permutation and Ensembling (BPE), and a novel Self-reflection-guided EArly Stopping (SEAS) technique. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that BPE can boost the performance of BatchPrompt with a striking margin on a range of popular NLP tasks, including question answering (Boolq), textual entailment (RTE), and duplicate questions identification (QQP). These performances are even competitive with/higher than single-data prompting(SinglePrompt), while BatchPrompt requires much fewer LLM calls and input tokens (For SinglePrompt v.s. BatchPrompt with batch size 32, using just 9%-16% the number of LLM calls, Boolq accuracy 90.6% to 90.9% with 27.4% tokens, QQP accuracy 87.2% to 88.4% with 18.6% tokens, RTE accuracy 91.5% to 91.1% with 30.8% tokens). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to technically improve prompting efficiency of large language models. We hope our simple yet effective approach will shed light on the future research of large language models. The code will be released.

In the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt optimization is crucial for model performance. Although previous research has explored aspects like rephrasing prompt contexts, using various prompting techniques (like in-context learning and chain-of-thought), and ordering few-shot examples, our understanding of LLM sensitivity to prompt templates remains limited. Therefore, this paper examines the impact of different prompt templates on LLM performance. We formatted the same contexts into various human-readable templates, including plain text, Markdown, JSON, and YAML, and evaluated their impact across tasks like natural language reasoning, code generation, and translation using OpenAI's GPT models. Experiments show that GPT-3.5-turbo's performance varies by up to 40\% in a code translation task depending on the prompt template, while larger models like GPT-4 are more robust to these variations. Our analysis highlights the need to reconsider the use of fixed prompt templates, as different formats can significantly affect model performance.

With the success of large language models (LLMs) of code and their use as code assistants (e.g. Codex used in GitHub Copilot), techniques for introducing domain-specific knowledge in the prompt design process become important. In this work, we propose a framework called Repo-Level Prompt Generator that learns to generate example-specific prompts using prompt proposals. The prompt proposals take context from the entire repository, thereby incorporating both the structure of the repository and the context from other relevant files (e.g. imports, parent class files). Our technique doesn't require any access to the weights of the LLM, making it applicable in cases where we only have black-box access to the LLM. We conduct experiments on the task of single-line code-autocompletion using code repositories taken from Google Code archives. We demonstrate that an oracle constructed from our prompt proposals gives a remarkably high relative improvement of 36% over Codex, showing the quality of these proposals. Further, we show that when we train a model to predict a prompt proposal, we can achieve significant performance gains over Codex and other baselines. We release our code, data, and trained checkpoints at: https://github.com/shrivastavadisha/repo_level_prompt_generation.

Prompt learning for vision-language models, e.g., CoOp, has shown great success in adapting CLIP to different downstream tasks, making it a promising solution for federated learning due to computational reasons. Existing prompt learning techniques replace hand-crafted text prompts with learned vectors that offer improvements on seen classes, but struggle to generalize to unseen classes. Our work addresses this challenge by proposing Federated Text-driven Prompt Generation (FedTPG), which learns a unified prompt generation network across multiple remote clients in a scalable manner. The prompt generation network is conditioned on task-related text input, thus is context-aware, making it suitable to generalize for both seen and unseen classes. Our comprehensive empirical evaluations on nine diverse image classification datasets show that our method is superior to existing federated prompt learning methods, that achieve overall better generalization on both seen and unseen classes and is also generalizable to unseen datasets.

Well-designed prompts are crucial for enhancing Large language models' (LLMs) reasoning capabilities while aligning their outputs with task requirements across diverse domains. However, manually designed prompts require expertise and iterative experimentation. While existing prompt optimization methods aim to automate this process, they rely heavily on external references such as ground truth or by humans, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where such data is unavailable or costly to obtain. To address this, we propose Self-Supervised Prompt Optimization (SPO), a cost-efficient framework that discovers effective prompts for both closed and open-ended tasks without requiring external reference. Motivated by the observations that prompt quality manifests directly in LLM outputs and LLMs can effectively assess adherence to task requirements, we derive evaluation and optimization signals purely from output comparisons. Specifically, SPO selects superior prompts through pairwise output comparisons evaluated by an LLM evaluator, followed by an LLM optimizer that aligns outputs with task requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPO outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods, achieving comparable or superior results with significantly lower costs (e.g., 1.1% to 5.6% of existing methods) and fewer samples (e.g., three samples). The code is available at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.

GPT-3 shows remarkable in-context learning ability of large-scale language models (LMs) trained on hundreds of billion scale data. Here we address some remaining issues less reported by the GPT-3 paper, such as a non-English LM, the performances of different sized models, and the effect of recently introduced prompt optimization on in-context learning. To achieve this, we introduce HyperCLOVA, a Korean variant of 82B GPT-3 trained on a Korean-centric corpus of 560B tokens. Enhanced by our Korean-specific tokenization, HyperCLOVA with our training configuration shows state-of-the-art in-context zero-shot and few-shot learning performances on various downstream tasks in Korean. Also, we show the performance benefits of prompt-based learning and demonstrate how it can be integrated into the prompt engineering pipeline. Then we discuss the possibility of materializing the No Code AI paradigm by providing AI prototyping capabilities to non-experts of ML by introducing HyperCLOVA studio, an interactive prompt engineering interface. Lastly, we demonstrate the potential of our methods with three successful in-house applications.

This paper presents the second ChatGPT4PCG competition at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Games. In this edition of the competition, we follow the first edition, but make several improvements and changes. We introduce a new evaluation metric along with allowing a more flexible format for participants' submissions and making several improvements to the evaluation pipeline. Continuing from the first edition, we aim to foster and explore the realm of prompt engineering (PE) for procedural content generation (PCG). While the first competition saw success, it was hindered by various limitations; we aim to mitigate these limitations in this edition. We introduce diversity as a new metric to discourage submissions aimed at producing repetitive structures. Furthermore, we allow submission of a Python program instead of a prompt text file for greater flexibility in implementing advanced PE approaches, which may require control flow, including conditions and iterations. We also make several improvements to the evaluation pipeline with a better classifier for similarity evaluation and better-performing function signatures. We thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of the new metric and the improved classifier. Additionally, we perform an ablation study to select a function signature to instruct ChatGPT for level generation. Finally, we provide implementation examples of various PE techniques in Python and evaluate their preliminary performance. We hope this competition serves as a resource and platform for learning about PE and PCG in general.

Large language models (LLMs) require well-crafted prompts for effective use. Prompt engineering, the process of designing prompts, is challenging, particularly for non-experts who are less familiar with AI technologies. While researchers have proposed techniques and tools to assist LLM users in prompt design, these works primarily target AI application developers rather than non-experts. To address this research gap, we propose social prompt engineering, a novel paradigm that leverages social computing techniques to facilitate collaborative prompt design. To investigate social prompt engineering, we introduce Wordflow, an open-source and social text editor that enables everyday users to easily create, run, share, and discover LLM prompts. Additionally, by leveraging modern web technologies, Wordflow allows users to run LLMs locally and privately in their browsers. Two usage scenarios highlight how social prompt engineering and our tool can enhance laypeople's interaction with LLMs. Wordflow is publicly accessible at https://poloclub.github.io/wordflow.

The remarkable success of pretrained language models has motivated the study of what kinds of knowledge these models learn during pretraining. Reformulating tasks as fill-in-the-blanks problems (e.g., cloze tests) is a natural approach for gauging such knowledge, however, its usage is limited by the manual effort and guesswork required to write suitable prompts. To address this, we develop AutoPrompt, an automated method to create prompts for a diverse set of tasks, based on a gradient-guided search. Using AutoPrompt, we show that masked language models (MLMs) have an inherent capability to perform sentiment analysis and natural language inference without additional parameters or finetuning, sometimes achieving performance on par with recent state-of-the-art supervised models. We also show that our prompts elicit more accurate factual knowledge from MLMs than the manually created prompts on the LAMA benchmark, and that MLMs can be used as relation extractors more effectively than supervised relation extraction models. These results demonstrate that automatically generated prompts are a viable parameter-free alternative to existing probing methods, and as pretrained LMs become more sophisticated and capable, potentially a replacement for finetuning.

Despite significant progress in the field, it is still challenging to create personalized visual representations that align closely with the desires and preferences of individual users. This process requires users to articulate their ideas in words that are both comprehensible to the models and accurately capture their vision, posing difficulties for many users. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by leveraging historical user interactions with the system to enhance user prompts. We propose a novel approach that involves rewriting user prompts based on a newly collected large-scale text-to-image dataset with over 300k prompts from 3115 users. Our rewriting model enhances the expressiveness and alignment of user prompts with their intended visual outputs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods over baseline approaches, as evidenced in our new offline evaluation method and online tests. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zzjchen/Tailored-Visions .

While LLMs can effectively help prototype single ML functionalities, many real-world applications involve complex tasks that cannot be easily handled via a single run of an LLM. Recent work has found that chaining multiple LLM runs together (with the output of one step being the input to the next) can help users accomplish these more complex tasks, and in a way that is perceived to be more transparent and controllable. However, it remains unknown what users need when authoring their own LLM chains -- a key step for lowering the barriers for non-AI-experts to prototype AI-infused applications. In this work, we explore the LLM chain authoring process. We conclude from pilot studies find that chaining requires careful scaffolding for transforming intermediate node outputs, as well as debugging the chain at multiple granularities; to help with these needs, we designed PromptChainer, an interactive interface for visually programming chains. Through case studies with four people, we show that PromptChainer supports building prototypes for a range of applications, and conclude with open questions on scaling chains to complex tasks, and supporting low-fi chain prototyping.

Prompt optimization aims to find the best prompt to a large language model (LLM) for a given task. LLMs have been successfully used to help find and improve prompt candidates for single-step tasks. However, realistic tasks for agents are multi-step and introduce new challenges: (1) Prompt content is likely to be more extensive and complex, making it more difficult for LLMs to analyze errors, (2) the impact of an individual step is difficult to evaluate, and (3) different people may have varied preferences about task execution. While humans struggle to optimize prompts, they are good at providing feedback about LLM outputs; we therefore introduce a new LLM-driven discrete prompt optimization framework PRompt Optimization in Multi-Step Tasks (PROMST) that incorporates human-designed feedback rules to automatically offer direct suggestions for improvement. We also use an extra learned heuristic model that predicts prompt performance to efficiently sample from prompt candidates. This approach significantly outperforms both human-engineered prompts and several other prompt optimization methods across 11 representative multi-step tasks (an average 10.6\%-29.3\% improvement to current best methods on five LLMs respectively). We believe our work can serve as a benchmark for automatic prompt optimization for LLM-driven multi-step tasks. Datasets and Codes are available at https://github.com/yongchao98/PROMST. Project Page is available at https://yongchao98.github.io/MIT-REALM-PROMST.

Despite impressive recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models, obtaining high-quality images often requires prompt engineering by humans who have developed expertise in using them. In this work, we present NeuroPrompts, an adaptive framework that automatically enhances a user's prompt to improve the quality of generations produced by text-to-image models. Our framework utilizes constrained text decoding with a pre-trained language model that has been adapted to generate prompts similar to those produced by human prompt engineers. This approach enables higher-quality text-to-image generations and provides user control over stylistic features via constraint set specification. We demonstrate the utility of our framework by creating an interactive application for prompt enhancement and image generation using Stable Diffusion. Additionally, we conduct experiments utilizing a large dataset of human-engineered prompts for text-to-image generation and show that our approach automatically produces enhanced prompts that result in superior image quality. We make our code, a screencast video demo and a live demo instance of NeuroPrompts publicly available.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various real-world tasks. However, they often struggle to fully comprehend and effectively utilize their input contexts, resulting in responses that are unfaithful or hallucinated. This difficulty increases for contexts that are long or contain distracting information, which can divert LLMs from fully capturing essential evidence. To address this issue, many works use prompting to help LLMs utilize contextual information more faithfully. For instance, iterative prompting highlights key information in two steps that first ask the LLM to identify important pieces of context and then derive answers accordingly. However, prompting methods are constrained to highlighting key information implicitly in token space, which is often insufficient to fully steer the model's attention. To improve model faithfulness more reliably, we propose AutoPASTA, a method that automatically identifies key contextual information and explicitly highlights it by steering an LLM's attention scores. Like prompting, AutoPASTA is applied at inference time and does not require changing any model parameters. Our experiments on open-book QA demonstrate that AutoPASTA effectively enables models to grasp essential contextual information, leading to substantially improved model faithfulness and performance, e.g., an average improvement of 7.95% for LLAMA3-70B-Instruct. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/QingruZhang/AutoPASTA .

In-context learning is a recent paradigm in natural language understanding, where a large pre-trained language model (LM) observes a test instance and a few training examples as its input, and directly decodes the output without any update to its parameters. However, performance has been shown to strongly depend on the selected training examples (termed prompt). In this work, we propose an efficient method for retrieving prompts for in-context learning using annotated data and a LM. Given an input-output pair, we estimate the probability of the output given the input and a candidate training example as the prompt, and label training examples as positive or negative based on this probability. We then train an efficient dense retriever from this data, which is used to retrieve training examples as prompts at test time. We evaluate our approach on three sequence-to-sequence tasks where language utterances are mapped to meaning representations, and find that it substantially outperforms prior work and multiple baselines across the board.

This paper presents an experimental study regarding the use of OpenAI's ChatGPT for robotics applications. We outline a strategy that combines design principles for prompt engineering and the creation of a high-level function library which allows ChatGPT to adapt to different robotics tasks, simulators, and form factors. We focus our evaluations on the effectiveness of different prompt engineering techniques and dialog strategies towards the execution of various types of robotics tasks. We explore ChatGPT's ability to use free-form dialog, parse XML tags, and to synthesize code, in addition to the use of task-specific prompting functions and closed-loop reasoning through dialogues. Our study encompasses a range of tasks within the robotics domain, from basic logical, geometrical, and mathematical reasoning all the way to complex domains such as aerial navigation, manipulation, and embodied agents. We show that ChatGPT can be effective at solving several of such tasks, while allowing users to interact with it primarily via natural language instructions. In addition to these studies, we introduce an open-sourced research tool called PromptCraft, which contains a platform where researchers can collaboratively upload and vote on examples of good prompting schemes for robotics applications, as well as a sample robotics simulator with ChatGPT integration, making it easier for users to get started with using ChatGPT for robotics.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 promise automation with better results and less programming, opening up new opportunities for text analysis in political science. In this study, we evaluate LLMs on three original coding tasks involving typical complexities encountered in political science settings: a non-English language, legal and political jargon, and complex labels based on abstract constructs. Along the paper, we propose a practical workflow to optimize the choice of the model and the prompt. We find that the best prompting strategy consists of providing the LLMs with a detailed codebook, as the one provided to human coders. In this setting, an LLM can be as good as or possibly better than a human annotator while being much faster, considerably cheaper, and much easier to scale to large amounts of text. We also provide a comparison of GPT and popular open-source LLMs, discussing the trade-offs in the model's choice. Our software allows LLMs to be easily used as annotators and is publicly available: https://github.com/lorelupo/pappa.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in solving a wide range of tasks in a resource-efficient manner through prompting, which does not require task-specific training, but suffers from performance fluctuation when there are multiple prompt candidates. Previous works have introduced gradient-free probability-based prompt selection methods that aim to choose the optimal prompt among the candidates for a given task but fail to provide a comprehensive and fair comparison between each other. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to interpret and evaluate the existing probability-based prompt selection methods by performing extensive experiments on 13 common NLP tasks. We find that all existing methods can be unified into some variant of the method that maximizes the mutual information between the input and the corresponding model output (denoted as MI). Using the finding, we develop several variants of MI and increases the effectiveness of the best prompt selection method from 87.79% to 94.98%, measured as the ratio of the performance of the selected prompt to that of the optimal oracle prompt. Furthermore, we propose a novel calibration method called Calibration by Marginalization (CBM) that is orthogonal to existing methods and helps increase the prompt selection effectiveness of the best method by 99.44%. The code and datasets used in our work will be released at https://github.com/soheeyang/unified-prompt-selection.

Diffusion models have demonstrated excellent capabilities in text-to-image generation. Their semantic understanding (i.e., prompt following) ability has also been greatly improved with large language models (e.g., T5, Llama). However, existing models cannot perfectly handle long and complex text prompts, especially when the text prompts contain various objects with numerous attributes and interrelated spatial relationships. While many regional prompting methods have been proposed for UNet-based models (SD1.5, SDXL), but there are still no implementations based on the recent Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, such as SD3 and FLUX.1.In this report, we propose and implement regional prompting for FLUX.1 based on attention manipulation, which enables DiT with fined-grained compositional text-to-image generation capability in a training-free manner. Code is available at https://github.com/antonioo-c/Regional-Prompting-FLUX.

With growing capabilities of large language models, prompting them has become the dominant way to access them. This has motivated the development of strategies for automatically selecting effective language prompts. In this paper, we introduce prompt flatness, a new metric to quantify the expected utility of a language prompt. This metric is inspired by flatness regularization in statistical learning that quantifies the robustness of the model towards its parameter perturbations. We provide theoretical foundations for this metric and its relationship with other prompt selection metrics, providing a comprehensive understanding of existing methods. Empirically, we show that combining prompt flatness with existing metrics improves both performance and sample efficiency. Our metric outperforms the previous prompt selection metrics with an average increase of 5% in accuracy and 10% in Pearson correlation across 6 classification benchmarks.

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.

The stories and characters that captivate us as we grow up shape unique fantasy worlds, with images serving as the primary medium for visually experiencing these realms. Personalizing generative models through fine-tuning with theme-specific data has become a prevalent approach in text-to-image generation. However, unlike object customization, which focuses on learning specific objects, theme-specific generation encompasses diverse elements such as characters, scenes, and objects. Such diversity also introduces a key challenge: how to adaptively generate multi-character, multi-concept, and continuous theme-specific images (TSI). Moreover, fine-tuning approaches often come with significant computational overhead, time costs, and risks of overfitting. This paper explores a fundamental question: Can image generation models directly leverage images as contextual input, similarly to how large language models use text as context? To address this, we present T-Prompter, a novel training-free TSI method for generation. T-Prompter introduces visual prompting, a mechanism that integrates reference images into generative models, allowing users to seamlessly specify the target theme without requiring additional training. To further enhance this process, we propose a Dynamic Visual Prompting (DVP) mechanism, which iteratively optimizes visual prompts to improve the accuracy and quality of generated images. Our approach enables diverse applications, including consistent story generation, character design, realistic character generation, and style-guided image generation. Comparative evaluations against state-of-the-art personalization methods demonstrate that T-Prompter achieves significantly better results and excels in maintaining character identity preserving, style consistency and text alignment, offering a robust and flexible solution for theme-specific image generation.

A challenge in the Dialogue State Tracking (DST) field is adapting models to new domains without using any supervised data, zero-shot domain adaptation. Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) has the potential to address this problem due to its robustness. However, it has yet to be applied to the zero-shot scenarios, as it is not clear how to apply it unsupervisedly. Our method, Prompter, uses descriptions of target domain slots to generate dynamic prefixes that are concatenated to the key and values at each layer's self-attention mechanism. This allows for the use of prefix-tuning in zero-shot. Prompter outperforms previous methods on both the MultiWOZ and SGD benchmarks. In generating prefixes, our analyses find that Prompter not only utilizes the semantics of slot descriptions but also how often the slots appear together in conversation. Moreover, Prompter's gains are due to its improved ability to distinguish "none"-valued dialogue slots, compared against baselines.

Designing high-quality educational questions is a challenging and time-consuming task. In this work, we propose a novel approach that utilizes prompt-based techniques to generate descriptive and reasoning-based questions. However, current question-answering (QA) datasets are inadequate for conducting our experiments on prompt-based question generation (QG) in an educational setting. Therefore, we curate a new QG dataset called EduProbe for school-level subjects, by leveraging the rich content of NCERT textbooks. We carefully annotate this dataset as quadruples of 1) Context: a segment upon which the question is formed; 2) Long Prompt: a long textual cue for the question (i.e., a longer sequence of words or phrases, covering the main theme of the context); 3) Short Prompt: a short textual cue for the question (i.e., a condensed representation of the key information or focus of the context); 4) Question: a deep question that aligns with the context and is coherent with the prompts. We investigate several prompt-based QG methods by fine-tuning pre-trained transformer-based large language models (LLMs), namely PEGASUS, T5, MBART, and BART. Moreover, we explore the performance of two general-purpose pre-trained LLMs such as Text-Davinci-003 and GPT-3.5-Turbo without any further training. By performing automatic evaluation, we show that T5 (with long prompt) outperforms all other models, but still falls short of the human baseline. Under human evaluation criteria, TextDavinci-003 usually shows better results than other models under various prompt settings. Even in the case of human evaluation criteria, QG models mostly fall short of the human baseline. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/my625/PromptQG

In recent years, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred a growing demand for plug-and-play AI systems. Among the various AI techniques, prompt engineering stands out as particularly significant. However, users often face challenges in writing prompts due to the steep learning curve and significant time investment, and existing automatic prompt engineering (APE) models can be difficult to use. To address this issue, we propose PAS, an LLM-based plug-and-play APE system. PAS utilizes LLMs trained on high-quality, automatically generated prompt complementary datasets, resulting in exceptional performance. In comprehensive benchmarks, PAS achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) results compared to previous APE models, with an average improvement of 6.09 points. Moreover, PAS is highly efficient, achieving SoTA performance with only 9000 data points. Additionally, PAS can autonomously generate prompt augmentation data without requiring additional human labor. Its flexibility also allows it to be compatible with all existing LLMs and applicable to a wide range of tasks. PAS excels in human evaluations, underscoring its suitability as a plug-in for users. This combination of high performance, efficiency, and flexibility makes PAS a valuable system for enhancing the usability and effectiveness of LLMs through improved prompt engineering.

With the spread of the use of Text2Img diffusion models such as DALL-E 2, Imagen, Mid Journey and Stable Diffusion, one challenge that artists face is selecting the right prompts to achieve the desired artistic output. We present techniques for measuring the effect that specific words and phrases in prompts have, and (in the Appendix) present guidance on the selection of prompts to produce desired effects.

With the help of in-context learning (ICL), large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various tasks. However, the function of descriptive instructions during ICL remains under-explored. In this work, we propose an ensemble prompt framework to describe the selection criteria of multiple in-context examples, and preliminary experiments on machine translation (MT) across six translation directions confirm that this framework boosts ICL perfromance. But to our surprise, LLMs might not necessarily care what the descriptions actually say, and the performance gain is primarily caused by the ensemble format, since the framework could lead to improvement even with random descriptive nouns. We further apply this new ensemble prompt on a range of commonsense, math, logical reasoning and hallucination tasks with three LLMs and achieve promising results, suggesting again that designing a proper prompt format would be much more effective and efficient than paying effort into specific descriptions. Our code will be publicly available once this paper is published.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great success in code generation. LLMs take as the input a prompt and output the code. A key question is how to make prompts (i.e., Prompting Techniques). Existing prompting techniques are designed for natural language generation and have low accuracy in code generation. In this paper, we propose a new prompting technique named AceCoder. Our motivation is that code generation meets two unique challenges (i.e., requirement understanding and code implementation). AceCoder contains two novel mechanisms (i.e., guided code generation and example retrieval) to solve these challenges. (1) Guided code generation asks LLMs first to analyze requirements and output an intermediate preliminary (e.g., test cases). The preliminary is used to clarify requirements and tell LLMs "what to write". (2) Example retrieval selects similar programs as examples in prompts, which provide lots of relevant content (e.g., algorithms, APIs) and teach LLMs "how to write". We apply AceCoder to three LLMs (e.g., Codex) and evaluate it on three public benchmarks using the Pass@k. Results show that AceCoder can significantly improve the performance of LLMs on code generation. (1) In terms of Pass@1, AceCoder outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 56.4% in MBPP, 70.7% in MBJP, and 88.4% in MBJSP. (2) AceCoder is effective in LLMs with different sizes (i.e., 6B to 13B) and different languages (i.e., Python, Java, and JavaScript). (3) Human evaluation shows human developers prefer programs from AceCoder.

Highly effective, task-specific prompts are often heavily engineered by experts to integrate detailed instructions and domain insights based on a deep understanding of both instincts of large language models (LLMs) and the intricacies of the target task. However, automating the generation of such expert-level prompts remains elusive. Existing prompt optimization methods tend to overlook the depth of domain knowledge and struggle to efficiently explore the vast space of expert-level prompts. Addressing this, we present PromptAgent, an optimization method that autonomously crafts prompts equivalent in quality to those handcrafted by experts. At its core, PromptAgent views prompt optimization as a strategic planning problem and employs a principled planning algorithm, rooted in Monte Carlo tree search, to strategically navigate the expert-level prompt space. Inspired by human-like trial-and-error exploration, PromptAgent induces precise expert-level insights and in-depth instructions by reflecting on model errors and generating constructive error feedback. Such a novel framework allows the agent to iteratively examine intermediate prompts (states), refine them based on error feedbacks (actions), simulate future rewards, and search for high-reward paths leading to expert prompts. We apply PromptAgent to 12 tasks spanning three practical domains: BIG-Bench Hard (BBH), as well as domain-specific and general NLP tasks, showing it significantly outperforms strong Chain-of-Thought and recent prompt optimization baselines. Extensive analyses emphasize its capability to craft expert-level, detailed, and domain-insightful prompts with great efficiency and generalizability.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a new way to build chatbots by accepting natural language prompts. Yet, it is unclear how to design prompts to power chatbots to carry on naturalistic conversations while pursuing a given goal, such as collecting self-report data from users. We explore what design factors of prompts can help steer chatbots to talk naturally and collect data reliably. To this aim, we formulated four prompt designs with different structures and personas. Through an online study (N = 48) where participants conversed with chatbots driven by different designs of prompts, we assessed how prompt designs and conversation topics affected the conversation flows and users' perceptions of chatbots. Our chatbots covered 79% of the desired information slots during conversations, and the designs of prompts and topics significantly influenced the conversation flows and the data collection performance. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of building chatbots with LLMs.

Popular prompt strategies like Chain-of-Thought Prompting can dramatically improve the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various domains. However, such hand-crafted prompt-strategies are often sub-optimal. In this paper, we present Promptbreeder, a general-purpose self-referential self-improvement mechanism that evolves and adapts prompts for a given domain. Driven by an LLM, Promptbreeder mutates a population of task-prompts, and subsequently evaluates them for fitness on a training set. Crucially, the mutation of these task-prompts is governed by mutation-prompts that the LLM generates and improves throughout evolution in a self-referential way. That is, Promptbreeder is not just improving task-prompts, but it is also improving the mutationprompts that improve these task-prompts. Promptbreeder outperforms state-of-the-art prompt strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve Prompting on commonly used arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, Promptbreeder is able to evolve intricate task-prompts for the challenging problem of hate speech classification.

Prompting and fine-tuning have emerged as two competing paradigms for augmenting language models with new capabilities, such as the use of tools. Prompting approaches are quick to set up but rely on providing explicit demonstrations of each tool's usage in the model's prompt, thus coupling tool use to the task at hand and limiting generalisation. Fine-tuning removes the need for task-specific demonstrations of tool usage at runtime; however, this ties new capabilities to a single model, thus making already-heavier setup costs a recurring expense. In this paper, we introduce language hooks, a novel framework for augmenting language models with new capabilities that is decoupled both from the model's task-specific prompt and from the model itself. The language hook algorithm interleaves text generation by the base model with the execution of modular programs that trigger conditionally based on the existing text and the available capabilities. Upon triggering, programs may call external tools, auxiliary language models (e.g. using tool specific prompts), and modify the existing context. We benchmark our method against state-of-the-art baselines, find that it outperforms task-aware approaches, and demonstrate its ability to generalise to novel tasks.

This case study investigates the task of job classification in a real-world setting, where the goal is to determine whether an English-language job posting is appropriate for a graduate or entry-level position. We explore multiple approaches to text classification, including supervised approaches such as traditional models like Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and state-of-the-art deep learning methods such as DeBERTa. We compare them with Large Language Models (LLMs) used in both few-shot and zero-shot classification settings. To accomplish this task, we employ prompt engineering, a technique that involves designing prompts to guide the LLMs towards the desired output. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of two commercially available state-of-the-art GPT-3.5-based language models, text-davinci-003 and gpt-3.5-turbo. We also conduct a detailed analysis of the impact of different aspects of prompt engineering on the model's performance. Our results show that, with a well-designed prompt, a zero-shot gpt-3.5-turbo classifier outperforms all other models, achieving a 6% increase in Precision@95% Recall compared to the best supervised approach. Furthermore, we observe that the wording of the prompt is a critical factor in eliciting the appropriate "reasoning" in the model, and that seemingly minor aspects of the prompt significantly affect the model's performance.

Recently, prompt-tuning has achieved promising results for specific few-shot classification tasks. The core idea of prompt-tuning is to insert text pieces (i.e., templates) into the input and transform a classification task into a masked language modeling problem. However, for relation extraction, determining an appropriate prompt template requires domain expertise, and it is cumbersome and time-consuming to obtain a suitable label word. Furthermore, there exists abundant semantic and prior knowledge among the relation labels that cannot be ignored. To this end, we focus on incorporating knowledge among relation labels into prompt-tuning for relation extraction and propose a Knowledge-aware Prompt-tuning approach with synergistic optimization (KnowPrompt). Specifically, we inject latent knowledge contained in relation labels into prompt construction with learnable virtual type words and answer words. Then, we synergistically optimize their representation with structured constraints. Extensive experimental results on five datasets with standard and low-resource settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowPrompt for reproducibility.

We propose PromptBERT, a novel contrastive learning method for learning better sentence representation. We firstly analyze the drawback of current sentence embedding from original BERT and find that it is mainly due to the static token embedding bias and ineffective BERT layers. Then we propose the first prompt-based sentence embeddings method and discuss two prompt representing methods and three prompt searching methods to make BERT achieve better sentence embeddings. Moreover, we propose a novel unsupervised training objective by the technology of template denoising, which substantially shortens the performance gap between the supervised and unsupervised settings. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method. Compared to SimCSE, PromptBert achieves 2.29 and 2.58 points of improvement based on BERT and RoBERTa in the unsupervised setting.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success across a wide range of natural language generation tasks, where proper prompt designs make great impacts. While existing prompting methods are normally restricted to providing correct information, in this paper, we encourage the model to deliberate by proposing a novel Deliberate then Generate (DTG) prompting framework, which consists of error detection instructions and candidates that may contain errors. DTG is a simple yet effective technique that can be applied to various text generation tasks with minimal modifications. We conduct extensive experiments on 20+ datasets across 7 text generation tasks, including summarization, translation, dialogue, and more. We show that DTG consistently outperforms existing prompting methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple text generation tasks. We also provide in-depth analyses to reveal the underlying mechanisms of DTG, which may inspire future research on prompting for LLMs.

We propose PromptTTS++, a prompt-based text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system that allows control over speaker identity using natural language descriptions. To control speaker identity within the prompt-based TTS framework, we introduce the concept of speaker prompt, which describes voice characteristics (e.g., gender-neutral, young, old, and muffled) designed to be approximately independent of speaking style. Since there is no large-scale dataset containing speaker prompts, we first construct a dataset based on the LibriTTS-R corpus with manually annotated speaker prompts. We then employ a diffusion-based acoustic model with mixture density networks to model diverse speaker factors in the training data. Unlike previous studies that rely on style prompts describing only a limited aspect of speaker individuality, such as pitch, speaking speed, and energy, our method utilizes an additional speaker prompt to effectively learn the mapping from natural language descriptions to the acoustic features of diverse speakers. Our subjective evaluation results show that the proposed method can better control speaker characteristics than the methods without the speaker prompt. Audio samples are available at https://reppy4620.github.io/demo.promptttspp/.

Abbreviation expansion is a strategy used to speed up communication by limiting the amount of typing and using a language model to suggest expansions. Here we look at personalizing a Large Language Model's (LLM) suggestions based on prior conversations to enhance the relevance of predictions, particularly when the user data is small (~1000 samples). Specifically, we compare fine-tuning, prompt-tuning, and retrieval augmented generation of expanded text suggestions for abbreviated inputs. Our case study with a deployed 8B parameter LLM on a real user living with ALS, and experiments on movie character personalization indicates that (1) customization may be necessary in some scenarios and prompt-tuning generalizes well to those, (2) fine-tuning on in-domain data (with as few as 600 samples) still shows some gains, however (3) retrieval augmented few-shot selection also outperforms fine-tuning. (4) Parameter efficient tuning allows for efficient and scalable personalization. For prompt-tuning, we also find that initializing the learned "soft-prompts" to user relevant concept tokens leads to higher accuracy than random initialization.

Text-to-image generation models have grown in popularity due to their ability to produce high-quality images from a text prompt. One use for this technology is to enable the creation of more accessible art creation software. In this paper, we document the development of an alternative user interface that reduces the typing effort needed to enter image prompts by providing suggestions from a large language model, developed through iterative design and testing within the project team. The results of this testing demonstrate how generative text models can support the accessibility of text-to-image models, enabling users with a range of abilities to create visual art.

Prompt engineering is very important to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). When dealing with complex issues, prompt engineers tend to distill multiple patterns from examples and inject relevant solutions to optimize the prompts, achieving satisfying results. However, existing automatic prompt optimization techniques are only limited to producing single flow instructions, struggling with handling diverse patterns. In this paper, we present AMPO, an automatic prompt optimization method that can iteratively develop a multi-branched prompt using failure cases as feedback. Our goal is to explore a novel way of structuring prompts with multi-branches to better handle multiple patterns in complex tasks, for which we introduce three modules: Pattern Recognition, Branch Adjustment, and Branch Pruning. In experiments across five tasks, AMPO consistently achieves the best results. Additionally, our approach demonstrates significant optimization efficiency due to our adoption of a minimal search strategy.

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 candidates proposed by an LLM in order to maximize a chosen score function. To evaluate the quality of the selected instruction, we evaluate the zero-shot performance of another LLM following the selected instruction. Experiments on 24 NLP tasks show that our automatically generated instructions outperform the prior LLM baseline by a large margin and achieve better or comparable performance to the instructions generated by human annotators on 19/24 tasks. We conduct extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses to explore the performance of APE. We show that APE-engineered prompts can be applied to steer models toward truthfulness and/or informativeness, as well as to improve few-shot learning performance by simply prepending them to standard in-context learning prompts. Please check out our webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/automatic-prompt-engineer.

We propose a novel application of prompting Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to generate analogies and study how to design effective prompts for two task settings: generating a source concept analogous to a given target concept (aka Analogous Concept Generation or ACG), and generating an explanation of the similarity between a given pair of target concept and source concept (aka Analogous Explanation Generation or AEG). We found that it is feasible to prompt InstructGPT to generate meaningful analogies and the best prompts tend to be precise imperative statements especially with a low temperature setting. We also systematically analyzed the sensitivity of the InstructGPT model to prompt design, temperature, and injected spelling errors, and found that the model is particularly sensitive to certain variations (e.g., questions vs. imperative statements). Further, we conducted human evaluation on 1.4k of the generated analogies and found that the quality of generations varies substantially by model size. The largest InstructGPT model can achieve human-level performance at generating meaningful analogies for a given target while there is still room for improvement on the AEG task.

The recent explosion in the capabilities of large language models has led to a wave of interest in how best to prompt a model to perform a given task. While it may be tempting to simply choose a prompt based on average performance on a validation set, this can lead to a deployment where unexpectedly poor responses are generated, especially for the worst-off users. To mitigate this prospect, we propose Prompt Risk Control, a lightweight framework for selecting a prompt based on rigorous upper bounds on families of informative risk measures. We offer methods for producing bounds on a diverse set of metrics, including quantities that measure worst-case responses and disparities in generation quality across the population of users. In addition, we extend the underlying statistical bounding techniques to accommodate the possibility of distribution shifts in deployment. Experiments on applications such as open-ended chat, medical question summarization, and code generation highlight how such a framework can foster responsible deployment by reducing the risk of the worst outcomes.

Text-guided diffusion models (TDMs) are widely applied but can fail unexpectedly. Common failures include: (i) natural-looking text prompts generating images with the wrong content, or (ii) different random samples of the latent variables that generate vastly different, and even unrelated, outputs despite being conditioned on the same text prompt. In this work, we aim to study and understand the failure modes of TDMs in more detail. To achieve this, we propose SAGE, the first adversarial search method on TDMs that systematically explores the discrete prompt space and the high-dimensional latent space, to automatically discover undesirable behaviors and failure cases in image generation. We use image classifiers as surrogate loss functions during searching, and employ human inspections to validate the identified failures. For the first time, our method enables efficient exploration of both the discrete and intricate human language space and the challenging latent space, overcoming the gradient vanishing problem. Then, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SAGE on five widely used generative models and reveal four typical failure modes: (1) We find a variety of natural text prompts that generate images failing to capture the semantics of input texts. We further discuss the underlying causes and potential solutions based on the results. (2) We find regions in the latent space that lead to distorted images independent of the text prompt, suggesting that parts of the latent space are not well-structured. (3) We also find latent samples that result in natural-looking images unrelated to the text prompt, implying a possible misalignment between the latent and prompt spaces. (4) By appending a single adversarial token embedding to any input prompts, we can generate a variety of specified target objects. Project page: https://sage-diffusion.github.io/