LLM Prompting

LLM: Large Language Model

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The field studies how the wording and structure of inputs affect what language models understand, generate, and reliably follow. Common approaches include zero- and few-shot in-context learning, chain-of-thought and task decomposition, retrieval-augmented context, and structured prompts using schemas, roles, or constraints. Researchers also develop automated prompt search, feedback-driven refinement, and methods that adapt examples or context to each input, testing them on tasks such as reasoning, classification, code generation, and information extraction. Prompting can improve performance without changing model weights, but its effects vary across models and tasks: added instructions can hurt, and gains in accuracy may trade off with reliability, diversity, safety, or cost.

Latest papers

431 papers34 papers in the last four weeks, down 13% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Mar 27, 2026

A Regression Framework for Understanding Prompt Component Impact on LLM Performance

As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve and see further integration into software systems, so does the need to understand the conditions in which they will perform. We contribute a statistical framework for understanding the impact of specific prompt features on LLM performance. The approach extends previous explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods specifically to inspect LLMs by fitting regression models relating portions of the prompt to LLM evaluation. We apply our method to compare how two open-source models, Mistral-7B and GPT-OSS-20B, leverage the prompt to perform a simple arithmetic problem. Regression models of individual prompt portions explain 72% and 77% of variation in model performances, respectively. We find misinformation in the form of incorrect example query-answer pairs impedes both models from solving the arithmetic query, though positive examples do not find significant variability in the impact of positive and negative instructions - these prompts have contradictory effects on model performance. The framework serves as a tool for decision makers in critical scenarios to gain granular insight into how the prompt influences an LLM to solve a task.

Andrew Lauziere, Jonathan Daugherty, Taisa Kushner

Galois, Inc.

LLM Prompting LLM Interpretability Prompt Sensitivity

Mar 26, 2026

When Chain-of-Thought Backfires: Evaluating Prompt Sensitivity in Medical Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in medical settings, yet their sensitivity to prompt formatting remains poorly characterized. We evaluate MedGemma (4B and 27B parameters) on MedMCQA (4,183 questions) and PubMedQA (1,000 questions) across a broad suite of robustness tests. Our experiments reveal several concerning findings. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting decreases accuracy by 5.7% compared to direct answering. Few-shot examples degrade performance by 11.9% while increasing position bias from 0.14 to 0.47. Shuffling answer options causes the model to change predictions 59.1% of the time, with accuracy dropping up to 27.4 percentage points. Front-truncating context to 50% causes accuracy to plummet below the no-context baseline, yet back-truncation preserves 97% of full-context accuracy. We further show that cloze scoring (selecting the highest log-probability option token) achieves 51.8% (4B) and 64.5% (27B), surpassing all prompting strategies and revealing that models "know" more than their generated text shows. Permutation voting recovers 4 percentage points over single-ordering inference. These results demonstrate that prompt engineering techniques validated on general-purpose models do not transfer to domain-specific medical LLMs, and that reliable alternatives exist.

Binesh Sadanandan, Vahid Behzadan

SAIL Lab, University of New Haven, West Haven, CT 06516, USA

Prompt Sensitivity LLM Prompting Language Model Robustness Medical LLMs Clinical Language Model Evaluation Medical QA

Mar 26, 2026

Can Small Models Reason About Legal Documents? A Comparative Study

Large language models show promise for legal applications, but deploying frontier models raises concerns about cost, latency, and data privacy. We evaluate whether sub-10B parameter models can serve as practical alternatives by testing nine models across three legal benchmarks (ContractNLI, CaseHOLD, and ECtHR) using five prompting strategies (direct, chain-of-thought, few-shot, BM25 RAG, and dense RAG). Across 405 experiments with three random seeds per configuration, we find that a Mixture-of-Experts model activating only 3B parameters matches GPT-4o-mini in mean accuracy while surpassing it on legal holding identification, and that architecture and training quality matter more than raw parameter count. Our largest model (9B parameters) performs worst overall. Chain-of-thought prompting proves sharply task-dependent, improving contract entailment but degrading multiple-choice legal reasoning, while few-shot prompting emerges as the most consistently effective strategy. Comparing BM25 and dense retrieval for RAG, we find near-identical results, suggesting the bottleneck lies in the language model's utilization of retrieved context rather than retrieval quality. All experiments were conducted via cloud inference APIs at a total cost of $62, demonstrating that rigorous LLM evaluation is accessible without dedicated GPU infrastructure.

Snehit Vaddi

Independent Researcher

Small Language Models Legal Reasoning LLM Evaluation Legal Document Analysis LLM Prompting Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Mar 26, 2026

Navigating the Prompt Space: Improving LLM Classification of Social Science Texts Through Prompt Engineering

Recent developments in text classification using Large Language Models (LLMs) in the social sciences suggest that costs can be cut significantly, while performance can sometimes rival existing computational methods. However, with a wide variance in performance in current tests, we move to the question of how to maximize performance. In this paper, we focus on prompt context as a possible avenue for increasing accuracy by systematically varying three aspects of prompt engineering: label descriptions, instructional nudges, and few shot examples. Across two different examples, our tests illustrate that a minimal increase in prompt context yields the highest increase in performance, while further increases in context only tend to yield marginal performance increases thereafter. Alarmingly, increasing prompt context sometimes decreases accuracy. Furthermore, our tests suggest substantial heterogeneity across models, tasks, and batch size, underlining the need for individual validation of each LLM coding task rather than reliance on general rules.

Erkan Gunes, Christoffer Florczak, Tevfik Murat Yildirim

Constructor University · Aalborg University · University of Stavanger

Large Language Model-Based Text Classification LLM Prompting Text Classification LLM Evaluation Few-Shot Prompting

Mar 26, 2026

Does Structured Intent Representation Generalize? A Cross-Language, Cross-Model Empirical Study of 5W3H Prompting

Does structured intent representation generalize across languages and models? We study PPS (Prompt Protocol Specification), a 5W3H-based framework for structured intent representation in human-AI interaction, and extend prior Chinese-only evidence along three dimensions: two additional languages (English and Japanese), a fourth condition in which a user's simple prompt is automatically expanded into a full 5W3H specification by an AI-assisted authoring interface, and a new research question on cross-model output consistency. Across 2,160 model outputs (3 languages x 4 conditions x 3 LLMs x 60 tasks), we find that AI-expanded 5W3H prompts (Condition D) show no statistically significant difference in goal alignment from manually crafted 5W3H prompts (Condition C) across all three languages, while requiring only a single-sentence input from the user. Structured PPS conditions often reduce or reshape cross-model output variance, though this effect is not uniform across languages and metrics; the strongest evidence comes from identifying spurious low variance in unconstrained baselines. We also show that unstructured prompts exhibit a systematic dual-inflation bias: artificially high composite scores and artificially low apparent cross-model variance. These findings suggest that structured 5W3H representations can improve intent alignment and accessibility across languages and models, especially when AI-assisted authoring lowers the barrier for non-expert users.

Peng Gang

Huizhou Lateni AI Technology Co., Ltd., Huizhou, China · Huizhou University, Huizhou, China

Structured Prompting LLM Prompting LLM Alignment Cross-Lingual Consistency in Language Models Multilingual Language Model Evaluation

Mar 25, 2026

Enhanced Mycelium of Thought (EMoT): A Bio-Inspired Hierarchical Reasoning Architecture with Strategic Dormancy and Mnemonic Encoding

Current prompting paradigms for large language models (LLMs), including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT), follow linear or tree-structured reasoning paths that lack persistent memory, strategic dormancy, and cross-domain synthesis. We present the Enhanced Mycelium of Thought (EMoT) framework, a bio-inspired reasoning architecture that organises cognitive processing into a four-level hierarchy (Micro, Meso, Macro, Meta), implements strategic dormancy and reactivation of reasoning nodes, and integrates a Memory Palace with five mnemonic encoding styles. EMoT is a research prototype for complex, multi-domain problems, not a general-purpose prompting enhancement. Two complementary evaluations reveal a characteristic trade-off. In a blind LLM-as-Judge evaluation across three domains, EMoT achieved near-parity with CoT (4.20 vs. 4.33/5.0) with higher stability, and outperformed CoT on Cross-Domain Synthesis (4.8 vs. 4.4). Ablation studies show that strategic dormancy is architecturally essential (quality collapsed from 4.2 to 1.0 when disabled). On a 15-item short-answer benchmark, EMoT (27%) substantially underperformed simpler baselines, confirming systematic overthinking on simple problems. These results are subject to important limitations: small sample sizes (n=3 complex cases, n=15 short-answer items), LLM-as-Judge evaluation with potential self-preference bias, and approximately 33-fold computational cost overhead. To our knowledge, EMoT is the first reasoning framework to combine hierarchical topology, strategic thought dormancy with reactivation, and mnemonic memory encoding in a single architecture.

Florian Odi Stummer

Institute of General Medicine Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

LLM Prompting Memory-Augmented Language Models Overthinking in Language Models

Mar 25, 2026

Dialogue to Question Generation for Evidence-based Medical Guideline Agent Development

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is central to high-quality care, but remains difficult to implement in fast-paced primary care settings. Physicians face short consultations, increasing patient loads, and lengthy guideline documents that are impractical to consult in real time. To address this gap, we investigate the feasibility of using large language models (LLMs) as ambient assistants that surface targeted, evidence-based questions during physician-patient encounters. Our study focuses on question generation rather than question answering, with the aim of scaffolding physician reasoning and integrating guideline-based practice into brief consultations. We implemented two prompting strategies, a zero-shot baseline and a multi-stage reasoning variant, using Gemini 2.5 as the backbone model. We evaluated on a benchmark of 80 de-identified transcripts from real clinical encounters, with six experienced physicians contributing over 90 hours of structured review. Results indicate that while general-purpose LLMs are not yet fully reliable, they can produce clinically meaningful and guideline-relevant questions, suggesting significant potential to reduce cognitive burden and make EBM more actionable at the point of care.

Zongliang Ji, Ziyang Zhang, Xincheng Tan +5

Google Research · University of Toronto, Canada · Vector Institute, Canada +1

Clinical Decision Support Evidence-Grounded Generation Medical LLMs LLM Prompting

Mar 24, 2026

Wafer-Level Etch Spatial Profiling for Process Monitoring from Time-Series with Time-LLM

Understanding wafer-level spatial variations from in-situ process signals is essential for advanced plasma etching process monitoring. While most data-driven approaches focus on scalar indicators such as average etch rate, actual process quality is determined by complex two-dimensional spatial distributions across the wafer. This paper presents a spatial regression model that predicts wafer-level etch depth distributions directly from multichannel in-situ process time series. We propose a Time-LLM-based spatial regression model that extends LLM reprogramming from conventional time-series forecasting to wafer-level spatial estimation by redesigning the input embedding and output projection. Using the BOSCH plasma-etching dataset, we demonstrate stable performance under data-limited conditions, supporting the feasibility of LLM-based reprogramming for wafer-level spatial monitoring.

Hyunwoo Kim, Munyoung Lee, Seung Hyub Jeon +1

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

Semiconductor Manufacturing Predictive Process Monitoring LLM Prompting

Mar 23, 2026

LLMON: An LLM-native Markup Language to Leverage Structure and Semantics at the LLM Interface

Textual Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a simple and familiar interface: a string of text is used for both input and output. However, the information conveyed to an LLM often has a richer structure and semantics, which is not conveyed in a string. For example, most prompts contain both instructions ("Summarize this paper into a paragraph") and data (the paper to summarize), but these are usually not distinguished when passed to the model. This can lead to model confusion and security risks, such as prompt injection attacks. This work addresses this shortcoming by introducing an LLM-native mark-up language, LLMON (LLM Object Notation, pronounced "Lemon"), that enables the structure and semantic metadata of the text to be communicated in a natural way to an LLM. This information can then be used during model training, model prompting, and inference implementation, leading to improvements in model accuracy, safety, and security. This is analogous to how programming language types can be used for many purposes, such as static checking, code generation, dynamic checking, and IDE highlighting. We discuss the general design requirements of an LLM-native markup language, introduce the LLMON markup language and show how it meets these design requirements, describe how the information contained in a LLMON artifact can benefit model training and inference implementation, and provide some preliminary empirical evidence of its value for both of these use cases. We also discuss broader issues and research opportunities that are enabled with an LLM-native approach.

Michael Hind, Basel Shbita, Bo Wu +5

IBM Research Yorktown Heights, New York · IBM Research San Jose, California · IBM Research Cambridge, Massachusetts

Structured Prompting LLM Prompting LLM Safety

Mar 23, 2026

SPA: A Simple but Tough-to-Beat Baseline for Knowledge Injection

While large language models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive amounts of data, their knowledge coverage remains incomplete in specialized, data-scarce domains, motivating extensive efforts to study synthetic data generation for knowledge injection. We propose SPA (Scaling Prompt-engineered Augmentation), a simple but tough-to-beat baseline that uses a small set of carefully designed prompts to generate large-scale synthetic data for knowledge injection. Through systematic comparisons, we find that SPA outperforms several strong baselines. Furthermore, we identify two key limitations of prior approaches: (1) while RL-based methods may improve the token efficiency of LLM-based data augmentation at small scale, they suffer from diversity collapse as data scales, leading to diminishing returns; and (2) while multi-stage prompting may outperform simple augmentation methods, their advantages can disappear after careful prompt tuning. Our results suggest that, for knowledge injection, careful prompt design combined with straightforward large-scale augmentation can be surprisingly effective, and we hope SPA can serve as a strong baseline for future studies in this area. Our code is available at https://github.com/Tangkexian/SPA.

Kexian Tang, Jiani Wang, Shaowen Wang +1

Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University

Knowledge Augmentation for Language Models Synthetic Data Generation for Language Models Large Language Model-Based Data Augmentation LLM Prompting

Mar 22, 2026

Left Behind: Cross-Lingual Transfer as a Bridge for Low-Resource Languages in Large Language Models

We investigate how large language models perform on low-resource languages by benchmarking eight LLMs across five experimental conditions in English, Kazakh, and Mongolian. Using 50 hand-crafted questions spanning factual, reasoning, technical, and culturally grounded categories, we evaluate 2,000 responses on accuracy, fluency, and completeness. We find a consistent performance gap of 13.8-16.7 percentage points between English and low-resource language conditions, with models maintaining surface-level fluency while producing significantly less accurate content. Cross-lingual transfer-prompting models to reason in English before translating back-yields selective gains for bilingual architectures (+2.2pp to +4.3pp) but provides no benefit to English-dominant models. Our results demonstrate that current LLMs systematically underserve low-resource language communities, and that effective mitigation strategies are architecture-dependent rather than universal.

Abdul-Salem Beibitkhan

North American University

Low-Resource Language Processing Multilingual Language Model Evaluation Cross-Lingual Transfer LLM Prompting

Mar 19, 2026

Evaluating 5W3H Structured Prompting for Intent Alignment in Human-AI Interaction

Natural language prompts often suffer from intent transmission loss: the gap between what users actually need and what they communicate to AI systems. We evaluate PPS (Prompt Protocol Specification), a 5W3H-based framework for structured intent representation in human-AI interaction. In a controlled three-condition study across 60 tasks in three domains (business, technical, and travel), three large language models (DeepSeek-V3, Qwen-Max, and Kimi), and three prompt conditions - (A) simple prompts, (B) raw PPS JSON, and (C) natural-language-rendered PPS - we collect 540 AI-generated outputs evaluated by an LLM judge. We introduce goal_alignment, a user-intent-centered evaluation dimension, and find that rendered PPS outperforms both simple prompts and raw JSON on this metric. PPS gains are task-dependent: gains are large in high-ambiguity business analysis tasks but reverse in low-ambiguity travel planning. We also identify a measurement asymmetry in standard LLM evaluation, where unconstrained prompts can inflate constraint adherence scores and mask the practical value of structured prompting. A preliminary retrospective survey (N = 20) further suggests a 66.1% reduction in follow-up prompts required, from 3.33 to 1.13 rounds. These findings suggest that structured intent representations can improve alignment and usability in human-AI interaction, especially in tasks where user intent is inherently ambiguous.

Peng Gang

Huizhou Lateni AI Technology Co., Ltd., Huizhou, China · Huizhou University, Huizhou, China

Structured Prompting LLM Prompting Human-AI Interaction Language Model Generation Evaluation

Mar 18, 2026

Temperature-Dependent Performance of Prompting Strategies in Extended Reasoning Large Language Models

Extended reasoning models represent a transformative shift in Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities by enabling explicit test-time computation for complex problem solving. However, the optimal configuration of sampling temperature and prompting strategy for these systems remains largely underexplored. We systematically evaluate chain-of-thought and zero-shot prompting across four temperature settings (0.0, 0.4, 0.7, and 1.0) using Grok-4.1 with extended reasoning on 39 mathematical problems from AMO-Bench, a challenging International Mathematical Olympiad-level benchmark. We find that zero-shot prompting achieves peak performance at moderate temperatures, reaching 59% accuracy at T=0.4 and T=0.7, while chain-of-thought prompting performs best at the temperature extremes. Most notably, the benefit of extended reasoning increases from 6x at T=0.0 to 14.3x at T=1.0. These results suggest that temperature should be optimized jointly with prompting strategy, challenging the common practice of using T=0 for reasoning tasks.

Mousa Salah, Amgad Muneer

Department of Computer Engineering, Gujarat Technological University, India · The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas, USA

LLM Prompting LLM Reasoning Large Reasoning Models Language Model Decoding

Mar 16, 2026

Prompt Engineering for Scale Development in Generative Psychometrics

This Monte Carlo simulation examines how prompt engineering strategies shape the quality of large language model (LLM)--generated personality assessment items within the AI-GENIE framework for generative psychometrics. Item pools targeting the Big Five traits were generated using multiple prompting designs (zero-shot, few-shot, persona-based, and adaptive), model temperatures, and LLMs, then evaluated and reduced using network psychometric methods. Across all conditions, AI-GENIE reliably improved structural validity following reduction, with the magnitude of its incremental contribution inversely related to the quality of the incoming item pool. Prompt design exerted a substantial influence on both pre- and post-reduction item quality. Adaptive prompting consistently outperformed non-adaptive strategies by sharply reducing semantic redundancy, elevating pre-reduction structural validity, and preserving substantially larger item pool, particularly when paired with newer, higher-capacity models. These gains were robust across temperature settings for most models, indicating that adaptive prompting mitigates common trade-offs between creativity and psychometric coherence. An exception was observed for the GPT-4o model at high temperatures, suggesting model-specific sensitivity to adaptive constraints at elevated stochasticity. Overall, the findings demonstrate that adaptive prompting is the strongest approach in this context, and that its benefits scale with model capability, motivating continued investigation of model--prompt interactions in generative psychometric pipelines.

Lara Lee Russell-Lasalandra, Hudson Golino

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Prompt Engineering LLM Prompting Psychometric Validation

Mar 16, 2026

Can LLMs Model Incorrect Student Reasoning? A Case Study on Distractor Generation

Modeling student misconceptions in a realistic manner is critical for AI in education. In this work, we examine how large language models (LLMs) reason about misconceptions when generating distractor answers for multiple-choice questions (MCQs), a task that requires producing answers that are incorrect, yet plausible. We introduce a taxonomy over reasoning strategies for distractor generation that is grounded in learning-science literature and empirical observation, which we apply to LLM-generated reasoning traces across math and science MCQs. On the math dataset, we find that models follow a misconception-based process with potentially high diagnostic value: they recover the correct solution, articulate student errors, simulate them, and select plausible candidates. On the science dataset, on the other hand, they tend to follow a less robust approach based on semantic similarity to the correct answer. We find the most frequent failure modes to be that the model is unable to generate a correct solution or that it discards plausible distractor candidates when performing selection. Providing the correct solution in the prompt yields a relative improvement of 6.4% in alignment with human-authored distractors, highlighting the critical role of anchoring distractor generation to the correct solution. Together, our findings offer an interpretable view of how LLMs model incorrect student reasoning.

Yanick Zengaffinen, Andreas Opedal, Donya Rooein +3

1ETH Zürich · 2Bocconi University · University of Central Florida

LLM Prompting Generative AI in Education User Modeling Text Generation LLM Reasoning

Mar 14, 2026

Memory-Driven Role-Playing: Evaluation and Enhancement of Persona Knowledge Utilization in LLMs

A core challenge for faithful LLM role-playing is sustaining consistent characterization throughout long, open-ended dialogues, as models frequently fail to recall and accurately apply their designated persona knowledge without explicit cues. To tackle this, we propose the Memory-Driven Role-Playing paradigm. Inspired by Stanislavski's "emotional memory" acting theory, this paradigm frames persona knowledge as the LLM's internal memory store, requiring retrieval and application based solely on dialogue context, thereby providing a rigorous test of depth and autonomous use of knowledge. Centered on this paradigm, we contribute: (1) MREval, a fine-grained evaluation framework assessing four memory-driven abilities - Anchoring, Recalling, Bounding, and Enacting; (2) MRPrompt, a prompting architecture that guides structured memory retrieval and response generation; and (3) MRBench, a bilingual (Chinese/English) benchmark for fine-grained diagnosis. The novel paradigm provides a comprehensive diagnostic for four-staged role-playing abilities across 12 LLMs. Crucially, experiments show that MRPrompt allows small models (e.g., Qwen3-8B) to match the performance of much larger closed-source LLMs (e.g., Qwen3-Max and GLM-4.7), and confirms that upstream memory gains directly enhance downstream response quality, validating the staged theoretical foundation.

Kai Wang, Haoyang You, Yang Zhang +1

Harbin Institute of Technology, China · Macquarie University, Australia

Large Language Model-Based Role-Play Simulation LLM Prompting Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation

Mar 13, 2026

Large Language Models and Scientific Discourse: Where's the Intelligence?

We explore the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by comparing the way they gather data with the way humans build knowledge. Here we examine how scientific knowledge is made and compare it with LLMs. The argument is structured by reference to two figures, one representing scientific knowledge and the other LLMs. In a 2014 study, scientists explain how they choose to ignore a 'fringe science' paper in the domain of gravitational wave physics: the decisions are made largely as a result of tacit knowledge built up in social discourse, most spoken discourse, within closed groups of experts. It is argued that LLMs cannot or do not currently access such discourse, but it is typical of the early formation of scientific knowledge. LLMs 'understanding' builds on written literatures and is therefore insecure in the case of the initial stages of knowledge building. We refer to Colin Fraser's 'Dumb Monty Hall problem' where in 2023 ChatGPT failed though a year later or so later LLMs were succeeding. We argue that this is not a matter of improvement in LLMs ability to reason but in the change in the body of human written discourse on which they can draw (or changes being put in by humans 'by hand'). We then invent a new Monty Hall prompt and compare the responses of a panel of LLMs and a panel of humans: they are starkly different but we explain that the previous mechanisms will soon allow the LLMs to align themselves to humans once more. Finally, we look at 'overshadowing' where a settled body of discourse becomes so dominant that LLMs fail to respond to small variations in prompts which render the old answers nonsensical. The 'intelligence' we argue is in the humans not the LLMs

Harry Collins, Simon Thorne

Institute of Education, UCL, 20 Bedford Way, London, WC1H OAL, UK. · School of Technologies, Cardiff Metropolitan University, 200 Western Avenue, Cardiff, CF5 2YB, UK.

Scientific Reasoning in Language Models LLM Reliability Factual Knowledge in Language Models LLM Prompting

Mar 12, 2026

Can Decision Trees Teach Large Language Models? Distilling Verbalized Knowledge for Molecular Property Prediction

Molecular Property Prediction (MPP) is a fundamental problem in drug discovery that has recently attracted growing attention. Large Language Models (LLMs), known for their impressive proficiency across domains, show promise as generalist models for MPP. However, their current performance remains below the threshold needed for practical adoption. To bridge this gap, we propose TreeKD for distilling the knowledge of tree-based specialist models into LLMs to complement the internal knowledge of LLMs and improve their predictive accuracy. For each property, we train a specialist decision tree using features derived from 40K functional groups in the input molecules. Then, the predictive rule learned by the decision tree, which encodes its knowledge, is verbalized and incorporated into the prompts for training LLMs. In addition, by replacing a single decision tree with a Random Forest, we introduce a test-time scaling technique called rule-consistency, which aggregates predictions generated from different prompts constructed with different rules. An extensive evaluation with two LLMs, Gemma-2-2B and Granite-3.3-2B, on the TDC benchmark with 22 prediction tasks shows that our method substantially enhances the performance of LLMs, advancing the development of generalist models for MPP.

Khiem Le, Sreejata Dey, Marcos Martínez Galindo +4

University of Notre Dame, IN, USA · IBM Research

Molecular Property Prediction Knowledge Distillation LLM Prompting

Mar 12, 2026

Large Language Models for Biomedical Article Classification

This work presents a systematic and in-depth investigation of the utility of large language models as text classifiers for biomedical article classification. The study uses several small and mid-size open source models, as well as selected closed source ones, and is more comprehensive than most prior work with respect to the scope of evaluated configurations: different types of prompts, output processing methods for generating both class and class probability predictions, as well as few-shot example counts and selection methods. The performance of the most successful configurations is compared to that of conventional classification algorithms. The obtained average PR AUC over 15 challenging datasets above 0.4 for zero-shot prompting and nearly 0.5 for few-shot prompting comes close to that of the naïve Bayes classifier (0.5), the random forest algorithm (0.5 with default settings or 0.55 with hyperparameter tuning) and fine-tuned transformer models (0.5). These results confirm the utility of large language models as text classifiers for non-trivial domains and provide practical recommendations of the most promising setups, including in particular using output token probabilities for class probability prediction.

Jakub Proboszcz, Paweł Cichosz

Institute of Computer Science, Warsaw University of Technology, Nowowiejska 15/19, 00-665 Warsaw, Poland

Few-Shot Text Classification Large Language Model-Based Text Classification Text Classification Classification LLM Evaluation Zero-Shot Text Classification+1

Mar 12, 2026

UtilityMax Prompting: A Formal Framework for Multi-Objective Large Language Model Tasks

The success of a Large Language Model (LLM) task depends heavily on its prompt. Most use-cases specify prompts using natural language, which is inherently ambiguous when multiple objectives must be simultaneously satisfied. In this paper we introduce UtilityMax Prompting, a framework that specifies tasks using formal mathematical language. We reconstruct the task as an influence diagram in which the LLM's answer is the sole decision variable. A utility function is defined over the conditional probability distributions within the diagram, and the LLM is instructed to find the answer that maximises expected utility. This constrains the LLM to reason explicitly about each component of the objective, directing its output toward a precise optimization target rather than a subjective natural language interpretation. We validate our approach on the MovieLens 1M dataset across three frontier models (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4, and Gemini 2.5 Pro), demonstrating consistent improvements in precision and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) over natural language baselines in a multi-objective movie recommendation task.

Ofir Marom

Independent Researcher

LLM Prompting LLM Decision-Making Large Language Model-Based Recommendation

Mar 11, 2026

PRISM- $Δ$ : Differential Subspace Steering for Prompt Highlighting in Large Language Models

Prompt highlighting steers a large language model to prioritize user-specified text spans during generation. A key challenge of existing Key-editing approaches is extracting steering directions that capture the difference between relevant and irrelevant contexts, rather than shared structural patterns common to both. We propose PRISM-

Δ

(Projection-based Relevance-Informed Steering Method), which decomposes the difference between positive and negative cross-covariance matrices to maximize discriminative energy while eliminating shared directions. Each attention head receives a continuous softplus importance weight, letting weak-but-useful heads contribute at reduced strength. The framework extends naturally to Value representations, capturing content-channel signal that Key-only methods leave unused. Across four benchmarks and five models, our methods match or exceed the best existing method on 19 of 20 configurations, with relative gains up to +13.0%, while halving the fluency cost of steering. Our methods also scale to long-context retrieval, outperforming the best existing method by up to +5.1% relative gain. PRISM-

Δ

is compatible with FlashAttention and adds negligible memory overhead.

Yuyao Ge, Shenghua Liu, Yiwei Wang +5

♣Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences · △University of California, Merced

Language Model Steering LLM Prompting Activation Steering

Mar 11, 2026

PEEM: Prompt Engineering Evaluation Metrics for Interpretable Joint Evaluation of Prompts and Responses

Prompt design is a primary control interface for large language models (LLMs), yet standard evaluations largely reduce performance to answer correctness, obscuring why a prompt succeeds or fails and providing little actionable guidance. We propose PEEM (Prompt Engineering Evaluation Metrics), a unified framework for joint and interpretable evaluation of both prompts and responses. PEEM defines a structured rubric with 9 axes: 3 prompt criteria (clarity/structure, linguistic quality, fairness) and 6 response criteria (accuracy, coherence, relevance, objectivity, clarity, conciseness), and uses an LLM-based evaluator to output (i) scalar scores on a 1-5 Likert scale and (ii) criterion-specific natural-language rationales grounded in the rubric. Across 7 benchmarks and 5 task models, PEEM's accuracy axis strongly aligns with conventional accuracy while preserving model rankings (aggregate Spearman rho about 0.97, Pearson r about 0.94, p < 0.001). A multi-evaluator study with four models shows consistent relative judgments (pairwise rho = 0.68-0.85), supporting evaluator-agnostic deployment. Beyond alignment, PEEM captures complementary linguistic failure modes and remains informative under prompt perturbations: prompt-quality trends track downstream accuracy under iterative rewrites, semantic adversarial manipulations induce clear score degradation, and meaning-preserving paraphrases yield high stability (robustness rate about 76.7-80.6%). Finally, using only PEEM scores and rationales as feedback, a zero-shot prompt rewriting loop improves downstream accuracy by up to 11.7 points, outperforming supervised and RL-based prompt-optimization baselines. Overall, PEEM provides a reproducible, criterion-driven protocol that links prompt formulation to response behavior and enables systematic diagnosis and optimization of LLM interactions.

Minki Hong, Eunsoo Lee, Sohyun Park +1

Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Dongguk University, South Korea

LLM Prompting LLM Evaluation Prompt Optimization LLM-as-a-Judge

Mar 11, 2026

Verbalizing LLM's Higher-order Uncertainty via Imprecise Probabilities

Despite the growing demand for eliciting uncertainty from large language models (LLMs), empirical evidence suggests that LLM behavior is not always adequately captured by the elicitation techniques developed under the classical probabilistic uncertainty framework. This mismatch leads to systematic failure modes, particularly in settings that involve ambiguous question-answering, in-context learning, and self-reflection. To address this, we propose novel prompt-based uncertainty elicitation techniques grounded in imprecise probabilities, a principled framework for repesenting and eliciting higher-order uncertainty. Here, first-order uncertainty captures uncertainty over possible responses to a prompt, while second-order uncertainty (uncertainty about uncertainty) quantifies indeterminacy in the underlying probability model itself. We introduce general-purpose prompting and post-processing procedures to directly elicit and quantify both orders of uncertainty, and demonstrate their effectiveness across diverse settings. Our approach enables more faithful uncertainty reporting from LLMs, improving credibility and supporting downstream decision-making.

Anita Yang, Krikamol Muandet, Michele Caprio +2

Lattice Lab, Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan · Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo, Japan · Rational Intelligence Lab, CISPA, Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany +3

Imprecise Probability LLM Uncertainty Estimation Epistemic Uncertainty LLM Prompting

Mar 10, 2026

Influencing LLM Multi-Agent Dialogue via Policy-Parameterized Prompts

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a new paradigm for multi-agent systems. However, existing research on the behaviour of LLM-based multi-agents relies on ad hoc prompts and lacks a principled policy perspective. Different from reinforcement learning, we investigate whether prompt-as-action can be parameterized so as to construct a lightweight policy which consists of a sequence of state-action pairs to influence conversational behaviours without training. Our framework regards prompts as actions executed by LLMs, and dynamically constructs prompts through five components based on the current state of the agent. To test the effectiveness of parameterized control, we evaluated the dialogue flow based on five indicators: responsiveness, rebuttal, evidence usage, non-repetition, and stance shift. We conduct experiments using different LLM-driven agents in two discussion scenarios related to the general public and show that prompt parameterization can influence the dialogue dynamics. This result shows that policy-parameterised prompts offer a simple and effective mechanism to influence the dialogue process, which will help the research of multi-agent systems in the direction of social simulation.

Hongbo Bo, Jingyu Hu, Weiru Liu

University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

Multi-Agent LLM Systems LLM Agents LLM Prompting Large Language Model-Based Social Simulation

Mar 10, 2026

Facial-Expression-Aware Prompting for Empathetic LLM Tutoring

Large language models (LLMs) enable increasingly capable tutoring-style conversational agents, yet effective tutoring requires sensitivity to learners' affective and cognitive states beyond text alone. Facial expressions provide immediate and practical cues of confusion, frustration, or engagement, but remain underexplored in LLM-driven tutoring. We investigate whether facial-expression-aware signals can improve empathetic tutoring responses through prompt-level integration, without end-to-end retraining. We build a scalable simulated tutoring environment where a student agent exhibits diverse facial behaviors from a large unlabeled human facial expression video dataset, and compare four tutor variants: a text-only LLM baseline, a multimodal baseline using a random facial frame, and two Action Unit estimation model (AUM)-based methods that either inject textual AU descriptions or select a peak-expression frame for visual grounding. Across 960 multi-turn conversations spanning three tutor backbones (GPT-5.1, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro), we evaluate targeted pairwise comparisons with five human raters and an exhaustive AI evaluator. AU-based conditioning consistently improves empathetic responsiveness to facial expressions across all tutor backbones, while AUM-guided peak-frame selection outperforms random-frame visual input. Textual AU abstraction and peak-frame visual injection show model-dependent advantages. Control analyses show that this improvement does not come at the expense of worse pedagogical clarity or responsiveness to textual cues. Overall, our results show that lightweight, structured facial expression representations can meaningfully enhance empathy in LLM-based tutoring systems with minimal overhead. Future work should evaluate these methods using real student facial data collected during authentic learning interactions.

Shuangquan Feng, Laura Fleig, Ruisen Tu +6

Neurosciences Graduate Program, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, USA · Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, USA · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, USA +4

Intelligent Tutoring Systems Emotion-Aware Dialogue Generation LLM Prompting Emotion Representation in Language Models

Mar 10, 2026

Quantifying Gender Bias in Large Language Models: When ChatGPT Becomes a Hiring Manager

The growing prominence of large language models (LLMs) in daily life has heightened concerns that LLMs exhibit many of the same gender-related biases as their creators. In the context of hiring decisions, we quantify the degree to which LLMs perpetuate societal biases and investigate prompt engineering as a bias mitigation technique. Our findings suggest that for a given resumé, an LLM is more likely to hire a female candidate and perceive them as more qualified, but still recommends lower pay relative to male candidates.

Nina Gerszberg, Janka Hamori, Andrew Lo

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Gender Bias in Language Models Algorithmic Bias Language Model Bias Evaluation LLM Prompting

Mar 9, 2026

Novel Semantic Prompting for Zero-Shot Action Recognition

Zero-shot action recognition relies on transferring knowledge from vision-language models to unseen actions using semantic descriptions. While recent methods focus on temporal modeling or architectural adaptations to handle video data, we argue that semantic prompting alone provides a strong and underexplored signal for zero-shot action understanding. We introduce SP-CLIP, a lightweight framework that augments frozen vision-language models with structured semantic prompts describing actions at multiple levels of abstraction, such as intent, motion, and object interaction. Without modifying the visual encoder or learning additional parameters, SP-CLIP aligns video representations with enriched textual semantics through prompt aggregation and consistency scoring. Experiments across standard benchmarks show that semantic prompting substantially improves zero-shot action recognition, particularly for fine-grained and compositional actions, while preserving the efficiency and generalization of pretrained models.

Salman Iqbal, Waheed Rehman

Zero-Shot Action Recognition Video Action Recognition Zero-Shot Learning Vision-Language Models LLM Prompting

Mar 9, 2026

In-Context Reinforcement Learning for Tool Use in Large Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning abilities, their performance on complex tasks is often constrained by the limitations of their internal knowledge. A compelling approach to overcome this challenge is to augment these models with external tools -- such as Python interpreters for mathematical computations or search engines for retrieving factual information. However, enabling models to use these tools effectively remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on cold-start pipelines that begin with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), followed by reinforcement learning (RL). These approaches often require substantial amounts of labeled data for SFT, which is expensive to annotate or synthesize. In this work, we propose In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL), an RL-only framework that eliminates the need for SFT by leveraging few-shot prompting during the rollout stage of RL. Specifically, ICRL introduces in-context examples within the rollout prompts to teach the model how to invoke external tools. Furthermore, as training progresses, the number of in-context examples is gradually reduced, eventually reaching a zero-shot setting where the model learns to call tools independently. We conduct extensive experiments across a range of reasoning and tool-use benchmarks. Results show that ICRL achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its effectiveness as a scalable, data-efficient alternative to traditional SFT-based pipelines.

Yaoqi Ye, Yiran Zhao, Keyu Duan +4

National University of Singapore · Salesforce AI Research · University of California Berkeley +1

RL for Tool Use In-Context RL RL for Language Model Reasoning LLM Prompting

Mar 8, 2026

Toward Epistemic Stability: Engineering Consistent Procedures for Industrial LLM Hallucination Reduction

Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) are outputs that are syntactically coherent but factually incorrect or contextually inconsistent. They are persistent obstacles in high-stakes industrial settings such as engineering design, enterprise resource planning, and IoT telemetry platforms. We present and compare five prompt engineering strategies intended to reduce the variance of model outputs and move toward repeatable, grounded results without modifying model weights or creating complex validation models. These methods include: (M1) Iterative Similarity Convergence, (M2) Decomposed Model-Agnostic Prompting, (M3) Single-Task Agent Specialization, (M4) Enhanced Data Registry, and (M5) Domain Glossary Injection. Each method is evaluated against an internal baseline using an LLM-as-Judge framework over 100 repeated runs per method (same fixed task prompt, stochastic decoding at tau = 0.7. Under this evaluation setup, M4 (Enhanced Data Registry) received ``Better'' verdicts in all 100 trials; M3 and M5 reached 80% and 77% respectively; M1 reached 75%; and M2 was net negative at 34% when compared to single shot prompting with a modern foundation model. We then developed enhanced version 2 (v2) implementations and assessed them on a 10-trial verification batch; M2 recovered from 34% to 80%, the largest gain among the four revised methods. We discuss how these strategies help overcome the non-deterministic nature of LLM results for industrial procedures, even when absolute correctness cannot be guaranteed. We provide pseudocode, verbatim prompts, and batch logs to support independent assessment.

Brian Freeman, Adam Kicklighter, Matt Erdman +1

Trane Technologies, Davidson NC, USA

LLM Hallucination Mitigation LLM Prompting LLM Reliability Self-Consistency in Language Models

Mar 7, 2026

Prompt Complexity Dilutes Structured Reasoning: A Follow-Up Study on the Car Wash Problem

In a previous study [Jo, 2026], STAR reasoning (Situation, Task, Action, Result) raised car wash problem accuracy from 0% to 85% on Claude Sonnet 4.5, and to 100% with additional prompt layers. This follow-up asks: does STAR maintain its effectiveness in a production system prompt? We tested STAR inside InterviewMate's 60+ line production prompt, which had evolved through iterative additions of style guidelines, format instructions, and profile features. Three conditions, 20 trials each, on Claude Sonnet 4.6: (A) production prompt with Anthropic profile, (B) production prompt with default profile, (C) original STAR-only prompt. C scored 100% (verified at n=100). A and B scored 0% and 30%. Prompt complexity dilutes structured reasoning. STAR achieves 100% in isolation but degrades to 0-30% when surrounded by competing instructions. The mechanism: directives like "Lead with specifics" force conclusion-first output, reversing the reason-then-conclude order that makes STAR effective. In one case, the model output "Short answer: Walk." then executed STAR reasoning that correctly identified the constraint -- proving the model could reason correctly but had already committed to the wrong answer. Cross-model comparison shows STAR-only improved from 85% (Sonnet 4.5) to 100% (Sonnet 4.6) without prompt changes, suggesting model upgrades amplify structured reasoning in isolation. These results imply structured reasoning frameworks should not be assumed to transfer from isolated testing to complex prompt environments. The order in which a model reasons and concludes is a first-class design variable.

Heejin Jo

Independent Researcher

LLM Prompting LLM Reasoning