DLPO: Towards a Robust, Efficient, and Generalizable Prompt Optimization Framework from a Deep-Learning Perspective
This addresses the scalability issue in prompt design for LLM users, but appears incremental as it builds on existing reflection-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automated prompt optimization for LLMs by proposing DLPO, a framework that integrates deep learning concepts to improve robustness, efficiency, and generalization, achieving unspecified performance gains validated through extensive experiments.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks, largely driven by well-designed prompts. However, crafting and selecting such prompts often requires considerable human effort, significantly limiting its scalability. To mitigate this, recent studies have explored automated prompt optimization as a promising solution. Despite these efforts, existing methods still face critical challenges in robustness, efficiency, and generalization. To systematically address these challenges, we first conduct an empirical analysis to identify the limitations of current reflection-based prompt optimization paradigm. Building on these insights, we propose 7 innovative approaches inspired by traditional deep learning paradigms for prompt optimization (DLPO), seamlessly integrating these concepts into text-based gradient optimization. Through these advancements, we progressively tackle the aforementioned challenges and validate our methods through extensive experimentation. We hope our study not only provides valuable guidance for future research but also offers a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and potential solutions in prompt optimization. Our code is available at https://github.com/sfasfaffa/DLPO.