Yang Chen

Yuanye Liu, Jiahang Xu, Li Lyna Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant capability across various tasks, with their real-world effectiveness often driven by prompt design. While recent research has focused on optimizing prompt content, the role of prompt formatting, a critical but often overlooked dimension, has received limited systematic investigation. In this paper, we introduce Content-Format Integrated Prompt Optimization (CFPO), an innovative methodology that jointly optimizes both prompt content and formatting through an iterative refinement process. CFPO leverages natural language mutations to explore content variations and employs a dynamic format exploration strategy that systematically evaluates diverse format options. Our extensive evaluations across multiple tasks and open-source LLMs demonstrate that CFPO demonstrates measurable performance improvements compared to content-only optimization methods. This highlights the importance of integrated content-format optimization and offers a practical, model-agnostic approach to enhancing LLM performance. Code is available at https://github.com/HenryLau7/CFPO.

Yang Chen, Yu Wang, Yingwei Pan et al.

Mainstream state-of-the-art domain generalization algorithms tend to prioritize the assumption on semantic invariance across domains. Meanwhile, the inherent intra-domain style invariance is usually underappreciated and put on the shelf. In this paper, we reveal that leveraging intra-domain style invariance is also of pivotal importance in improving the efficiency of domain generalization. We verify that it is critical for the network to be informative on what domain features are invariant and shared among instances, so that the network sharpens its understanding and improves its semantic discriminative ability. Correspondingly, we also propose a novel "jury" mechanism, which is particularly effective in learning useful semantic feature commonalities among domains. Our complete model called STEAM can be interpreted as a novel probabilistic graphical model, for which the implementation requires convenient constructions of two kinds of memory banks: semantic feature bank and style feature bank. Empirical results show that our proposed framework surpasses the state-of-the-art methods by clear margins.