Paper ID: 2410.20788

SCULPT: Systematic Tuning of Long Prompts

Shanu Kumar, Akhila Yesantarao Venkata, Shubhanshu Khandelwal, Bishal Santra, Parag Agrawal, Manish Gupta

As large language models become increasingly central to solving complex tasks, the challenge of optimizing long, unstructured prompts has become critical. Existing optimization techniques often struggle to effectively handle such prompts, leading to suboptimal performance. We introduce SCULPT (Systematic Tuning of Long Prompts), a novel framework that systematically refines long prompts by structuring them hierarchically and applying an iterative actor-critic mechanism. To enhance robustness and generalizability, SCULPT utilizes two complementary feedback mechanisms: Preliminary Assessment, which assesses the prompt's structure before execution, and Error Assessment, which diagnoses and addresses errors post-execution. By aggregating feedback from these mechanisms, SCULPT avoids overfitting and ensures consistent improvements in performance. Our experimental results demonstrate significant accuracy gains and enhanced robustness, particularly in handling erroneous and misaligned prompts. SCULPT consistently outperforms existing approaches, establishing itself as a scalable solution for optimizing long prompts across diverse and real-world tasks.

Submitted: Oct 28, 2024