Daily Papers

The medical dialogue system is a promising application that can provide great convenience for patients. The dialogue state tracking (DST) module in the medical dialogue system which interprets utterances into the machine-readable structure for downstream tasks is particularly challenging. Firstly, the states need to be able to represent compound entities such as symptoms with their body part or diseases with degrees of severity to provide enough information for decision support. Secondly, these named entities in the utterance might be discontinuous and scattered across sentences and speakers. These also make it difficult to annotate a large corpus which is essential for most methods. Therefore, we first define a multi-hierarchical state structure. We annotate and publish a medical dialogue dataset in Chinese. To the best of our knowledge, there are no publicly available ones before. Then we propose a Prompt-based Generative Approach which can generate slot values with multi-hierarchies incrementally using a top-down approach. A dialogue style prompt is also supplemented to utilize the large unlabeled dialogue corpus to alleviate the data scarcity problem. The experiments show that our approach outperforms other DST methods and is rather effective in the scenario with little data.

Selecting a sample generation scheme from multiple prompt-based generative models, including large language models (LLMs) and prompt-guided image and video generation models, is typically addressed by choosing the model that maximizes an averaged evaluation score. However, this score-based selection overlooks the possibility that different models achieve the best generation performance for different types of text prompts. An online identification of the best generation model for various input prompts can reduce the costs associated with querying sub-optimal models. In this work, we explore the possibility of varying rankings of text-based generative models for different text prompts and propose an online learning framework to predict the best data generation model for a given input prompt. The proposed PAK-UCB algorithm addresses a contextual bandit (CB) setting with shared context variables across the arms, utilizing the generated data to update kernel-based functions that predict the score of each model available for unseen text prompts. Additionally, we leverage random Fourier features (RFF) to accelerate the online learning process of PAK-UCB. Our numerical experiments on real and simulated text-to-image and image-to-text generative models show that RFF-UCB performs successfully in identifying the best generation model across different sample types. The code is available at: github.com/yannxiaoyanhu/dgm-online-select.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled users to provide highly specific music recommendation requests using natural language prompts (e.g. "Can you recommend some old classics for slow dancing?"). In this setup, the recommended tracks are predicted by the LLM in an autoregressive way, i.e. the LLM generates the track titles one token at a time. While intuitive, this approach has several limitation. First, it is based on a general purpose tokenization that is optimized for words rather than for track titles. Second, it necessitates an additional entity resolution layer that matches the track title to the actual track identifier. Third, the number of decoding steps scales linearly with the length of the track title, slowing down inference. In this paper, we propose to address the task of prompt-based music recommendation as a generative retrieval task. Within this setting, we introduce novel, effective, and efficient representations of track identifiers that significantly outperform commonly used strategies. We introduce Text2Tracks, a generative retrieval model that learns a mapping from a user's music recommendation prompt to the relevant track IDs directly. Through an offline evaluation on a dataset of playlists with language inputs, we find that (1) the strategy to create IDs for music tracks is the most important factor for the effectiveness of Text2Tracks and semantic IDs significantly outperform commonly used strategies that rely on song titles as identifiers (2) provided with the right choice of track identifiers, Text2Tracks outperforms sparse and dense retrieval solutions trained to retrieve tracks from language prompts.

Prompt compression methods enhance the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) and minimize the cost by reducing the length of input context. The goal of prompt compression is to shorten the LLM prompt while maintaining a high generation quality. However, existing solutions, mainly based on token removal, face challenges such as information loss and structural incoherence, like missing grammar elements in a sentence, or incomplete word phrases after token removal. Such challenges limit the final generation quality of LLM. To overcome these limitations, we present a novel generative prompt compression method. Unlike the existing token removal methods, our method centers at a chunking-and-summarization mechanism. Specifically, our method splits prompt into semantically coherent chunks and rewrites the chunks to be more concise. The chunks are reconstructed into meaningful prompt finally. We design several optimization techniques for the mechanism, including optimized semantic chunking, outlier chunk handling, dynamic compression ratio, compression prioritization, and keyword maintaining. These techniques effectively improve the identifying and preserving of critical information and coherence among texts, as well as providing finer grind control of the compression ratio. We conduct extensive evaluation on question-answering and summarization tasks, with datasets covering multiple different domain. The evaluation shows our method achieves a significantly better compression quality, and higher stability than the state-of-the-art methods, especially under high compression ratio, which proves the effectiveness and practicality of our method.

Objective To solve major clinical natural language processing (NLP) tasks using a unified text-to-text learning architecture based on a generative large language model (LLM) via prompt tuning. Methods We formulated 7 key clinical NLP tasks as text-to-text learning and solved them using one unified generative clinical LLM, GatorTronGPT, developed using GPT-3 architecture and trained with up to 20 billion parameters. We adopted soft prompts (i.e., trainable vectors) with frozen LLM, where the LLM parameters were not updated (i.e., frozen) and only the vectors of soft prompts were updated, known as prompt tuning. We added additional soft prompts as a prefix to the input layer, which were optimized during the prompt tuning. We evaluated the proposed method using 7 clinical NLP tasks and compared them with previous task-specific solutions based on Transformer models. Results and Conclusion The proposed approach achieved state-of-the-art performance for 5 out of 7 major clinical NLP tasks using one unified generative LLM. Our approach outperformed previous task-specific transformer models by ~3% for concept extraction and 7% for relation extraction applied to social determinants of health, 3.4% for clinical concept normalization, 3.4~10% for clinical abbreviation disambiguation, and 5.5~9% for natural language inference. Our approach also outperformed a previously developed prompt-based machine reading comprehension (MRC) model, GatorTron-MRC, for clinical concept and relation extraction. The proposed approach can deliver the ``one model for all`` promise from training to deployment using a unified generative LLM.

Generating fake data is an essential dimension of modern software testing, as demonstrated by the number and significance of data faking libraries. Yet, developers of faking libraries cannot keep up with the wide range of data to be generated for different natural languages and domains. In this paper, we assess the ability of generative AI for generating test data in different domains. We design three types of prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs), which perform test data generation tasks at different levels of integrability: 1) raw test data generation, 2) synthesizing programs in a specific language that generate useful test data, and 3) producing programs that use state-of-the-art faker libraries. We evaluate our approach by prompting LLMs to generate test data for 11 domains. The results show that LLMs can successfully generate realistic test data generators in a wide range of domains at all three levels of integrability.

Numerous studies have investigated methods for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate harmful content. Typically, these methods are evaluated using datasets of malicious prompts designed to bypass security policies established by LLM providers. However, the generally broad scope and open-ended nature of existing datasets can complicate the assessment of jailbreaking effectiveness, particularly in specific domains, notably cybersecurity. To address this issue, we present and publicly release CySecBench, a comprehensive dataset containing 12662 prompts specifically designed to evaluate jailbreaking techniques in the cybersecurity domain. The dataset is organized into 10 distinct attack-type categories, featuring close-ended prompts to enable a more consistent and accurate assessment of jailbreaking attempts. Furthermore, we detail our methodology for dataset generation and filtration, which can be adapted to create similar datasets in other domains. To demonstrate the utility of CySecBench, we propose and evaluate a jailbreaking approach based on prompt obfuscation. Our experimental results show that this method successfully elicits harmful content from commercial black-box LLMs, achieving Success Rates (SRs) of 65% with ChatGPT and 88% with Gemini; in contrast, Claude demonstrated greater resilience with a jailbreaking SR of 17%. Compared to existing benchmark approaches, our method shows superior performance, highlighting the value of domain-specific evaluation datasets for assessing LLM security measures. Moreover, when evaluated using prompts from a widely used dataset (i.e., AdvBench), it achieved an SR of 78.5%, higher than the state-of-the-art methods.

Large pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) have shown impressive zero-shot ability on downstream tasks with manually designed prompt, which are not optimal for specific domains. To further adapt VLMs to downstream tasks, soft prompt is proposed to replace manually designed prompt, which acts as a learning vector that undergoes fine-tuning based on specific domain data. Prior prompt learning methods primarily learn a fixed prompt and residuled prompt from training samples. However, the learned prompts lack diversity and ignore information about unseen domains, potentially compromising the transferability of the prompts. In this paper, we reframe the prompt learning framework from a generative perspective and propose a simple yet efficient method for the Domain Generalization (DG) task, namely Soft Prompt Generation (SPG). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce the generative model into prompt learning in VLMs and explore its potential for producing soft prompts by relying solely on the generative model, ensuring the diversity of prompts. Specifically, SPG consists of a two-stage training phase and an inference phase. During the training phase, we introduce soft prompt labels for each domain, aiming to incorporate the generative model domain knowledge. During the inference phase, the generator of the generative model is employed to obtain instance-specific soft prompts for the unseen target domain. Extensive experiments on five domain generalization benchmarks of three DG tasks demonstrate that our proposed SPG achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code will be available soon.

The ability of generative large language models (LLMs) to perform in-context learning has given rise to a large body of research into how best to prompt models for various natural language processing tasks. Machine Translation (MT) has been shown to benefit from in-context examples, in particular when they are semantically similar to the sentence to translate. In this paper, we propose a new LLM-based translation paradigm, compositional translation, to replace naive few-shot MT with similarity-based demonstrations. An LLM is used to decompose a sentence into simpler phrases, and then to translate each phrase with the help of retrieved demonstrations. Finally, the LLM is prompted to translate the initial sentence with the help of the self-generated phrase-translation pairs. Our intuition is that this approach should improve translation because these shorter phrases should be intrinsically easier to translate and easier to match with relevant examples. This is especially beneficial in low-resource scenarios, and more generally whenever the selection pool is small or out of domain. We show that compositional translation boosts LLM translation performance on a wide range of popular MT benchmarks, including FLORES 200, NTREX 128 and TICO-19. Code and outputs are available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/compositional-translation

We introduce a novel approach for concept blending in pretrained text-to-image diffusion models, aiming to generate images at the intersection of multiple text prompts. At each time step during diffusion denoising, our algorithm forecasts predictions w.r.t. the generated image and makes informed text conditioning decisions. Central to our method is the unique analogy between diffusion models, which are rooted in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and the Black-Scholes model for financial option pricing. By drawing parallels between key variables in both domains, we derive a robust algorithm for concept blending that capitalizes on the Markovian dynamics of the Black-Scholes framework. Our text-based concept blending algorithm is data-efficient, meaning it does not need additional training. Furthermore, it operates without human intervention or hyperparameter tuning. We highlight the benefits of our approach by comparing it qualitatively and quantitatively to other text based concept blending techniques, including linear interpolation, alternating prompts, step-wise prompt switching, and CLIP-guided prompt selection across various scenarios such as single object per text prompt, multiple objects per text prompt and objects against backgrounds. Our work shows that financially inspired techniques can enhance text-to-image concept blending in generative AI, paving the way for broader innovation. Code is available at https://github.com/divyakraman/BlackScholesDiffusion2024.

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

Recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have opened new opportunities for zero-shot text-guided segmentation of remote sensing imagery. However, most existing approaches still rely on additional trainable components, limiting their generalisation and practical applicability. In this work, we investigate to what extent text-based remote sensing segmentation can be achieved without additional training, by relying solely on existing foundation models. We propose a simple yet effective approach that integrates contrastive and generative VLMs with the Segment Anything Model (SAM), enabling a fully training-free or lightweight LoRA-tuned pipeline. Our contrastive approach employs CLIP as mask selector for SAM's grid-based proposals, achieving state-of-the-art open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) in a completely zero-shot setting. In parallel, our generative approach enables reasoning and referring segmentation by generating click prompts for SAM using GPT-5 in a zero-shot setting and a LoRA-tuned Qwen-VL model, with the latter yielding the best results. Extensive experiments across 19 remote sensing benchmarks, including open-vocabulary, referring, and reasoning-based tasks, demonstrate the strong capabilities of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/josesosajs/trainfree-rs-segmentation.

Skeleton-based action recognition has recently received considerable attention. Current approaches to skeleton-based action recognition are typically formulated as one-hot classification tasks and do not fully exploit the semantic relations between actions. For example, "make victory sign" and "thumb up" are two actions of hand gestures, whose major difference lies in the movement of hands. This information is agnostic from the categorical one-hot encoding of action classes but could be unveiled from the action description. Therefore, utilizing action description in training could potentially benefit representation learning. In this work, we propose a Generative Action-description Prompts (GAP) approach for skeleton-based action recognition. More specifically, we employ a pre-trained large-scale language model as the knowledge engine to automatically generate text descriptions for body parts movements of actions, and propose a multi-modal training scheme by utilizing the text encoder to generate feature vectors for different body parts and supervise the skeleton encoder for action representation learning. Experiments show that our proposed GAP method achieves noticeable improvements over various baseline models without extra computation cost at inference. GAP achieves new state-of-the-arts on popular skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks, including NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120 and NW-UCLA. The source code is available at https://github.com/MartinXM/GAP.

Urban design is a multifaceted process that demands careful consideration of site-specific constraints and collaboration among diverse professionals and stakeholders. The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers transformative potential by improving the efficiency of design generation and facilitating the communication of design ideas. However, most existing approaches are not well integrated with human design workflows. They often follow end-to-end pipelines with limited control, overlooking the iterative nature of real-world design. This study proposes a stepwise generative urban design framework that integrates multimodal diffusion models with human expertise to enable more adaptive and controllable design processes. Instead of generating design outcomes in a single end-to-end process, the framework divides the process into three key stages aligned with established urban design workflows: (1) road network and land use planning, (2) building layout planning, and (3) detailed planning and rendering. At each stage, multimodal diffusion models generate preliminary designs based on textual prompts and image-based constraints, which can then be reviewed and refined by human designers. We design an evaluation framework to assess the fidelity, compliance, and diversity of the generated designs. Experiments using data from Chicago and New York City demonstrate that our framework outperforms baseline models and end-to-end approaches across all three dimensions. This study underscores the benefits of multimodal diffusion models and stepwise generation in preserving human control and facilitating iterative refinements, laying the groundwork for human-AI interaction in urban design solutions.

Prompts used in recent large language model based applications are often fixed and lengthy, leading to significant computational overhead. To address this challenge, we propose Generative Context Distillation (GCD), a lightweight prompt internalization method that employs a joint training approach. This method not only replicates the behavior of models with prompt inputs but also generates the content of the prompt along with reasons for why the model's behavior should change accordingly. We demonstrate that our approach effectively internalizes complex prompts across various agent-based application scenarios. For effective training without interactions with the dedicated environments, we introduce a data synthesis technique that autonomously collects conversational datasets by swapping the roles of the agent and environment. This method is especially useful in scenarios where only a predefined prompt is available without a corresponding training dataset. By internalizing complex prompts, Generative Context Distillation enables high-performance and efficient inference without the need for explicit prompts.

Personalizing visual generative models to meet specific user needs has gained increasing attention, yet current methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) remain impractical due to their demand for task-specific data and lengthy optimization. While a few hypernetwork-based approaches attempt to predict adaptation weights directly, they struggle to map fine-grained user prompts to complex LoRA distributions, limiting their practical applicability. To bridge this gap, we propose LoFA, a general framework that efficiently predicts personalized priors for fast model adaptation. We first identify a key property of LoRA: structured distribution patterns emerge in the relative changes between LoRA and base model parameters. Building on this, we design a two-stage hypernetwork: first predicting relative distribution patterns that capture key adaptation regions, then using these to guide final LoRA weight prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently predicts high-quality personalized priors within seconds, across multiple tasks and user prompts, even outperforming conventional LoRA that requires hours of processing. Project page: https://jaeger416.github.io/lofa/.

Recent text-to-image generative models have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to generate diverse and creative imagery guided by a target text prompt. While revolutionary, current state-of-the-art diffusion models may still fail in generating images that fully convey the semantics in the given text prompt. We analyze the publicly available Stable Diffusion model and assess the existence of catastrophic neglect, where the model fails to generate one or more of the subjects from the input prompt. Moreover, we find that in some cases the model also fails to correctly bind attributes (e.g., colors) to their corresponding subjects. To help mitigate these failure cases, we introduce the concept of Generative Semantic Nursing (GSN), where we seek to intervene in the generative process on the fly during inference time to improve the faithfulness of the generated images. Using an attention-based formulation of GSN, dubbed Attend-and-Excite, we guide the model to refine the cross-attention units to attend to all subject tokens in the text prompt and strengthen - or excite - their activations, encouraging the model to generate all subjects described in the text prompt. We compare our approach to alternative approaches and demonstrate that it conveys the desired concepts more faithfully across a range of text prompts.

Current co-speech motion generation approaches usually focus on upper body gestures following speech contents only, while lacking supporting the elaborate control of synergistic full-body motion based on text prompts, such as talking while walking. The major challenges lie in 1) the existing speech-to-motion datasets only involve highly limited full-body motions, making a wide range of common human activities out of training distribution; 2) these datasets also lack annotated user prompts. To address these challenges, we propose SynTalker, which utilizes the off-the-shelf text-to-motion dataset as an auxiliary for supplementing the missing full-body motion and prompts. The core technical contributions are two-fold. One is the multi-stage training process which obtains an aligned embedding space of motion, speech, and prompts despite the significant distributional mismatch in motion between speech-to-motion and text-to-motion datasets. Another is the diffusion-based conditional inference process, which utilizes the separate-then-combine strategy to realize fine-grained control of local body parts. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify that our approach supports precise and flexible control of synergistic full-body motion generation based on both speeches and user prompts, which is beyond the ability of existing approaches.

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.

Query expansion is a widely used technique to improve the recall of search systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to query expansion that leverages the generative abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional query expansion approaches such as Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) that relies on retrieving a good set of pseudo-relevant documents to expand queries, we rely on the generative and creative abilities of an LLM and leverage the knowledge inherent in the model. We study a variety of different prompts, including zero-shot, few-shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). We find that CoT prompts are especially useful for query expansion as these prompts instruct the model to break queries down step-by-step and can provide a large number of terms related to the original query. Experimental results on MS-MARCO and BEIR demonstrate that query expansions generated by LLMs can be more powerful than traditional query expansion methods.

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.

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

Context: Test-driven development (TDD) is a widely employed software development practice that involves developing test cases based on requirements prior to writing the code. Although various methods for automated test case generation have been proposed, they are not specifically tailored for TDD, where requirements instead of code serve as input. Objective: In this paper, we introduce a text-to-testcase generation approach based on a large language model (GPT-3.5) that is fine-tuned on our curated dataset with an effective prompt design. Method: Our approach involves enhancing the capabilities of basic GPT-3.5 for text-to-testcase generation task that is fine-tuned on our curated dataset with an effective prompting design. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach using a span of five large-scale open-source software projects. Results: Our approach generated 7k test cases for open source projects, achieving 78.5% syntactic correctness, 67.09% requirement alignment, and 61.7% code coverage, which substantially outperforms all other LLMs (basic GPT-3.5, Bloom, and CodeT5). In addition, our ablation study demonstrates the substantial performance improvement of the fine-tuning and prompting components of the GPT-3.5 model. Conclusions: These findings lead us to conclude that fine-tuning and prompting should be considered in the future when building a language model for the text-to-testcase generation task

We study automatic question generation for sentences from text passages in reading comprehension. We introduce an attention-based sequence learning model for the task and investigate the effect of encoding sentence- vs. paragraph-level information. In contrast to all previous work, our model does not rely on hand-crafted rules or a sophisticated NLP pipeline; it is instead trainable end-to-end via sequence-to-sequence learning. Automatic evaluation results show that our system significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art rule-based system. In human evaluations, questions generated by our system are also rated as being more natural (i.e., grammaticality, fluency) and as more difficult to answer (in terms of syntactic and lexical divergence from the original text and reasoning needed to answer).

In this paper, we describe our participation in the subtask 1 of CASE-2022, Event Causality Identification with Casual News Corpus. We address the Causal Relation Identification (CRI) task by exploiting a set of simple yet complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models (LMs) on a small number of annotated examples (i.e., a few-shot configuration). We follow a prompt-based prediction approach for fine-tuning LMs in which the CRI task is treated as a masked language modeling problem (MLM). This approach allows LMs natively pre-trained on MLM problems to directly generate textual responses to CRI-specific prompts. We compare the performance of this method against ensemble techniques trained on the entire dataset. Our best-performing submission was fine-tuned with only 256 instances per class, 15.7% of the all available data, and yet obtained the second-best precision (0.82), third-best accuracy (0.82), and an F1-score (0.85) very close to what was reported by the winner team (0.86).

We study prompting-based approaches with Large Language Models (LLMs) for modifying documents so as to promote their ranking in a competitive search setting. Our methods are inspired by prior work on leveraging LLMs as rankers. We evaluate our approach by deploying it as a bot in previous ranking competitions and in competitions we organized. Our findings demonstrate that our approach effectively improves document ranking while preserving high levels of faithfulness to the original content and maintaining overall document quality.

Generative models for open domain question answering have proven to be competitive, without resorting to external knowledge. While promising, this approach requires to use models with billions of parameters, which are expensive to train and query. In this paper, we investigate how much these models can benefit from retrieving text passages, potentially containing evidence. We obtain state-of-the-art results on the Natural Questions and TriviaQA open benchmarks. Interestingly, we observe that the performance of this method significantly improves when increasing the number of retrieved passages. This is evidence that generative models are good at aggregating and combining evidence from multiple passages.

Recent advances have shown that optimizing prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs) can significantly improve task performance, yet many optimization techniques rely on heuristics or manual exploration. We present LatentPrompt, a model-agnostic framework for prompt optimization that leverages latent semantic space to automatically generate, evaluate, and refine candidate prompts without requiring hand-crafted rules. Beginning with a set of seed prompts, our method embeds them in a continuous latent space and systematically explores this space to identify prompts that maximize task-specific performance. In a proof-of-concept study on the Financial PhraseBank sentiment classification benchmark, LatentPrompt increased classification accuracy by approximately 3 percent after a single optimization cycle. The framework is broadly applicable, requiring only black-box access to an LLM and an automatic evaluation metric, making it suitable for diverse domains and tasks.

In this paper, we introduce a Multimodal Large Language Model-based Generation Assistant (LLMGA), leveraging the vast reservoir of knowledge and proficiency in reasoning, comprehension, and response inherent in Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist users in image generation and editing. Diverging from existing approaches where Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) generate fixed-size embeddings to control Stable Diffusion (SD), our LLMGA provides a detailed language generation prompt for precise control over SD. This not only augments LLM context understanding but also reduces noise in generation prompts, yields images with more intricate and precise content, and elevates the interpretability of the network. To this end, we curate a comprehensive dataset comprising prompt refinement, similar image generation, inpainting \& outpainting, and instruction-based editing. Moreover, we propose a two-stage training scheme. In the first stage, we train the MLLM to grasp the properties of image generation and editing, enabling it to generate detailed prompts. In the second stage, we optimize SD to align with the MLLM's generation prompts. Additionally, we propose a reference-based restoration network to alleviate texture, brightness, and contrast disparities between generated and preserved regions during inpainting and outpainting. Extensive results show that LLMGA has promising generation and editing capabilities and can enable more flexible and expansive applications in an interactive manner.

Aligning text-to-image generation with user intent remains challenging, for users who provide ambiguous inputs and struggle with model idiosyncrasies. We propose Adaptive Prompt Elicitation (APE), a technique that adaptively asks visual queries to help users refine prompts without extensive writing. Our technical contribution is a formulation of interactive intent inference under an information-theoretic framework. APE represents latent intent as interpretable feature requirements using language model priors, adaptively generates visual queries, and compiles elicited requirements into effective prompts. Evaluation on IDEA-Bench and DesignBench shows that APE achieves stronger alignment with improved efficiency. A user study with challenging user-defined tasks demonstrates 19.8% higher alignment without workload overhead. Our work contributes a principled approach to prompting that, for general users, offers an effective and efficient complement to the prevailing prompt-based interaction paradigm with text-to-image models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) generate fluent text, yet whether they truly understand the world or merely produce plausible texts about it remains contested. We propose an architectural principle, the mouth is not the brain, that explicitly separates world models from language models. Our architecture comprises three components: a DBM that captures domain structure as an energy-based world model, an adapter that projects latent belief states into embedding space, and a frozen GPT-2 that provides linguistic competence without domain knowledge. We instantiate this framework in the consumer review domain using Amazon smartphone reviews. Experiments demonstrate that (1) world model conditioning achieves lower cross-entropy loss and higher semantic similarity than architectural baselines including direct projection and full fine-tuning, while qualitative analysis reveals that soft prompt conditioning resolves a trade-off that prompt-based approaches cannot: simple prompts lack expressiveness while detailed prompts cause output collapse in small LLMs; (2) the DBM's energy function distinguishes coherent from incoherent market configurations, assigning higher energy to implausible brand-price combinations; and (3) interventions on specific attributes propagate causally to generated text with intervened outputs exhibiting distributions statistically consistent with naturally occurring samples sharing the target configuration. These findings suggest that even small-scale language models can achieve consistent, controllable generation when connected to an appropriate world model, providing empirical support for separating linguistic competence from world understanding.

Automated testbench generation has become a critical bottleneck in large language model (LLM)-driven Register Transfer Level (RTL) workflows, where large numbers of candidate designs must be verified rapidly and reliably. Existing prompt-based approaches treat testbench generation as unconstrained code synthesis, yielding stochastic outputs with high token cost, low reproducibility, and insufficient coverage. To address this gap, we present STG, a Structured Testbench Generation framework that exploits the inherent structure of hardware designs to generate deterministic testbenches. As a direct verification tool, STG runs 720x faster than an iterative LLM-based testbench generation flow and higher rate of successful compilation, achieves higher coverage, and reduces false-pass verdicts on incorrect DUTs. STG also helps identify errors in RTL generation benchmarks by exposing faulty benchmark testbenches. As a data curation engine, it is 11x faster than LLM-based filtering on a single CPU core with 127x less energy, and the resulting distilled models provide state-of-the-art performance in our multi-benchmark evaluation. As a test-time scaling oracle, it reduces node count by 14-47\%. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/AS-SiliconMind/siliconmind-v12.

Evaluating text-to-image models is notoriously difficult. A strong recent approach for assessing text-image faithfulness is based on QG/A (question generation and answering), which uses pre-trained foundational models to automatically generate a set of questions and answers from the prompt, and output images are scored based on whether these answers extracted with a visual question answering model are consistent with the prompt-based answers. This kind of evaluation is naturally dependent on the quality of the underlying QG and VQA models. We identify and address several reliability challenges in existing QG/A work: (a) QG questions should respect the prompt (avoiding hallucinations, duplications, and omissions) and (b) VQA answers should be consistent (not asserting that there is no motorcycle in an image while also claiming the motorcycle is blue). We address these issues with Davidsonian Scene Graph (DSG), an empirically grounded evaluation framework inspired by formal semantics, which is adaptable to any QG/A frameworks. DSG produces atomic and unique questions organized in dependency graphs, which (i) ensure appropriate semantic coverage and (ii) sidestep inconsistent answers. With extensive experimentation and human evaluation on a range of model configurations (LLM, VQA, and T2I), we empirically demonstrate that DSG addresses the challenges noted above. Finally, we present DSG-1k, an open-sourced evaluation benchmark that includes 1,060 prompts, covering a wide range of fine-grained semantic categories with a balanced distribution. We release the DSG-1k prompts and the corresponding DSG questions.

The widespread presence of hateful languages on social media has resulted in adverse effects on societal well-being. As a result, addressing this issue with high priority has become very important. Hate speech or offensive languages exist in both explicit and implicit forms, with the latter being more challenging to detect. Current research in this domain encounters several challenges. Firstly, the existing datasets primarily rely on the collection of texts containing explicit offensive keywords, making it challenging to capture implicitly offensive contents that are devoid of these keywords. Secondly, common methodologies tend to focus solely on textual analysis, neglecting the valuable insights that community information can provide. In this research paper, we introduce a novel dataset OffensiveLang, a community based implicit offensive language dataset generated by ChatGPT 3.5 containing data for 38 different target groups. Despite limitations in generating offensive texts using ChatGPT due to ethical constraints, we present a prompt-based approach that effectively generates implicit offensive languages. To ensure data quality, we evaluate the dataset with human. Additionally, we employ a prompt-based zero-shot method with ChatGPT and compare the detection results between human annotation and ChatGPT annotation. We utilize existing state-of-the-art models to see how effective they are in detecting such languages. The dataset is available here: https://github.com/AmitDasRup123/OffensiveLang

Query-focused table summarization requires generating natural language summaries of tabular data conditioned on a user query, enabling users to access insights beyond fact retrieval. Existing approaches face key limitations: table-to-text models require costly fine-tuning and struggle with complex reasoning, prompt-based LLM methods suffer from token-limit and efficiency issues while exposing sensitive data, and prior agentic pipelines often rely on decomposition, planning, or manual templates that lack robustness and scalability. To mitigate these issues, we introduce an agentic workflow, FACTS, a Fast, Accurate, and Privacy-Compliant Table Summarization approach via Offline Template Generation. FACTS produces offline templates, consisting of SQL queries and Jinja2 templates, which can be rendered into natural language summaries and are reusable across multiple tables sharing the same schema. It enables fast summarization through reusable offline templates, accurate outputs with executable SQL queries, and privacy compliance by sending only table schemas to LLMs. Evaluations on widely-used benchmarks show that FACTS consistently outperforms baseline methods, establishing it as a practical solution for real-world query-focused table summarization.

We present AutoBool, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that trains large language models (LLMs) to generate effective Boolean queries for medical systematic reviews. Boolean queries are the primary mechanism for literature retrieval in this domain and must achieve high recall while maintaining reasonable precision - a challenging balance that existing prompt-based LLM approaches often struggle to achieve. A major limitation in this space is the lack of high-quality ground-truth Boolean queries for each topic, which makes supervised fine-tuning impractical. AutoBool addresses this challenge by using RL to directly optimize query generation with retrieval measures, without requiring target queries. To support this effort, we create and release the largest dataset of its kind: 65588 topics in total for training and evaluating the task of automatic Boolean query formulation. Experiments on our new dataset and two established datasets (CLEF TAR and Seed Collection) show that AutoBool significantly outperforms zero shot/few shot prompting and matches or exceeds the effectiveness of much larger GPT-based models (e.g., GPT-4o, O3) using smaller backbones. It also approaches effectiveness of expert-authored queries while retrieving 10 to 16 times fewer documents. Ablation studies reveal the critical roles of model backbone, size, decoding temperature, and prompt design. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ielab/AutoBool.

The performance of deep learning-based natural language processing systems is based on large amounts of labeled training data which, in the clinical domain, are not easily available or affordable. Weak supervision and in-context learning offer partial solutions to this issue, particularly using large language models (LLMs), but their performance still trails traditional supervised methods with moderate amounts of gold-standard data. In particular, inferencing with LLMs is computationally heavy. We propose an approach leveraging fine-tuning LLMs and weak supervision with virtually no domain knowledge that still achieves consistently dominant performance. Using a prompt-based approach, the LLM is used to generate weakly-labeled data for training a downstream BERT model. The weakly supervised model is then further fine-tuned on small amounts of gold standard data. We evaluate this approach using Llama2 on three different n2c2 datasets. With no more than 10 gold standard notes, our final BERT models weakly supervised by fine-tuned Llama2-13B consistently outperformed out-of-the-box PubMedBERT by 4.7% to 47.9% in F1 scores. With only 50 gold standard notes, our models achieved close performance to fully fine-tuned systems.

The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF--better few-shot fine-tuning of language models--a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.

Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) can be instructed to effectively perform zero-shot passage re-ranking, in which the results of a first stage retrieval method, such as BM25, are rated and reordered to improve relevance. In this work, we improve LLM-based re-ranking by algorithmically selecting few-shot demonstrations to include in the prompt. Our analysis investigates the conditions where demonstrations are most helpful, and shows that adding even one demonstration is significantly beneficial. We propose a novel demonstration selection strategy based on difficulty rather than the commonly used semantic similarity. Furthermore, we find that demonstrations helpful for ranking are also effective at question generation. We hope our work will spur more principled research into question generation and passage ranking.

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.

With the advent of vision-language models (VLMs) that can perform in-context and prompt-based learning, how can we design prompting approaches that robustly generalize to distribution shift and can be used on novel classes outside the support set of the prompts? In this work, we first define two types of robustness to distribution shift on VLMs, namely, robustness on base classes (the classes included in the support set of prompts) and robustness on novel classes. Then, we study the robustness of existing in-context learning and prompt learning approaches, where we find that prompt learning performs robustly on test images from base classes, while it does not generalize well on images from novel classes. We propose robust prompt learning by integrating multiple-scale image features into the prompt, which improves both types of robustness. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to study the defined robustness on six benchmarks and show the effectiveness of our proposal.

Leveraging the powerful generation capability of large-scale pretrained text-to-image models, training-free methods have demonstrated impressive image editing results. Conventional diffusion-based methods, as well as recent rectified flow (RF)-based methods, typically reverse synthesis trajectories by gradually adding noise to clean images, during which the noisy latent at the current timestep is used to approximate that at the next timesteps, introducing accumulated drift and degrading reconstruction accuracy. Considering the fact that in RF the noisy latent is estimated through direct interpolation between Gaussian noises and clean images at each timestep, we propose Direct Noise Alignment (DNA), which directly refines the desired Gaussian noise in the noise domain, significantly reducing the error accumulation in previous methods. Specifically, DNA estimates the velocity field of the interpolated noised latent at each timestep and adjusts the Gaussian noise by computing the difference between the predicted and expected velocity field. We validate the effectiveness of DNA and reveal its relationship with existing RF-based inversion methods. Additionally, we introduce a Mobile Velocity Guidance (MVG) to control the target prompt-guided generation process, balancing image background preservation and target object editability. DNA and MVG collectively constitute our proposed method, namely DNAEdit. Finally, we introduce DNA-Bench, a long-prompt benchmark, to evaluate the performance of advanced image editing models. Experimental results demonstrate that our DNAEdit achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art text-guided editing methods. Codes and benchmark will be available at https://xiechenxi99.github.io/DNAEdit/{https://xiechenxi99.github.io/DNAEdit/}.

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.

Prevailing methods for mapping large generative language models to supervised tasks may fail to sufficiently probe models' novel capabilities. Using GPT-3 as a case study, we show that 0-shot prompts can significantly outperform few-shot prompts. We suggest that the function of few-shot examples in these cases is better described as locating an already learned task rather than meta-learning. This analysis motivates rethinking the role of prompts in controlling and evaluating powerful language models. In this work, we discuss methods of prompt programming, emphasizing the usefulness of considering prompts through the lens of natural language. We explore techniques for exploiting the capacity of narratives and cultural anchors to encode nuanced intentions and techniques for encouraging deconstruction of a problem into components before producing a verdict. Informed by this more encompassing theory of prompt programming, we also introduce the idea of a metaprompt that seeds the model to generate its own natural language prompts for a range of tasks. Finally, we discuss how these more general methods of interacting with language models can be incorporated into existing and future benchmarks and practical applications.

Popularized by the Differentiable Search Index, the emerging paradigm of generative retrieval re-frames the classic information retrieval problem into a sequence-to-sequence modeling task, forgoing external indices and encoding an entire document corpus within a single Transformer. Although many different approaches have been proposed to improve the effectiveness of generative retrieval, they have only been evaluated on document corpora on the order of 100k in size. We conduct the first empirical study of generative retrieval techniques across various corpus scales, ultimately scaling up to the entire MS MARCO passage ranking task with a corpus of 8.8M passages and evaluating model sizes up to 11B parameters. We uncover several findings about scaling generative retrieval to millions of passages; notably, the central importance of using synthetic queries as document representations during indexing, the ineffectiveness of existing proposed architecture modifications when accounting for compute cost, and the limits of naively scaling model parameters with respect to retrieval performance. While we find that generative retrieval is competitive with state-of-the-art dual encoders on small corpora, scaling to millions of passages remains an important and unsolved challenge. We believe these findings will be valuable for the community to clarify the current state of generative retrieval, highlight the unique challenges, and inspire new research directions.

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.

Flow matching models (FMs) have revolutionized text-to-image (T2I) generation, with reinforcement learning (RL) serving as a critical post-training strategy for alignment with reward objectives. In this research, we show that current RL pipelines for FMs suffer from two underappreciated yet important limitations: sample inefficiency due to insufficient generation diversity, and pronounced prompt overfitting, where models memorize specific training formulations and exhibit dramatic performance collapse when evaluated on semantically equivalent but stylistically varied prompts. We present PromptRL (Prompt Matters in RL for Flow-Based Image Generation), a framework that incorporates language models (LMs) as trainable prompt refinement agents directly within the flow-based RL optimization loop. This design yields two complementary benefits: rapid development of sophisticated prompt rewriting capabilities and, critically, a synergistic training regime that reshapes the optimization dynamics. PromptRL achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, obtaining scores of 0.97 on GenEval, 0.98 on OCR accuracy, and 24.05 on PickScore. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our RL approach on large-scale image editing models, improving the EditReward of FLUX.1-Kontext from 1.19 to 1.43 with only 0.06 million rollouts, surpassing Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (also known as Nano Banana), which scores 1.37, and achieving comparable performance with ReasonNet (1.44), which relied on fine-grained data annotations along with a complex multi-stage training. Our extensive experiments empirically demonstrate that PromptRL consistently achieves higher performance ceilings while requiring over 2times fewer rollouts compared to naive flow-only RL. Our code is available at https://github.com/G-U-N/UniRL.

Recent prompt optimisation approaches use the generative nature of language models to produce prompts -- even rivaling the performance of human-curated prompts. In this paper, we demonstrate that randomly sampling tokens from the model vocabulary as ``separators'' can be as effective as language models for prompt-style text classification. Our experiments show that random separators are competitive baselines, having less than a 1% difference compared to previous self-optimisation methods and showing a 12% average relative improvement over strong human baselines across nine text classification tasks and eight language models. We further analyse this phenomenon in detail using three different random generation strategies, establishing that the language space is rich with potentially good separators, with a greater than 40% average chance that a randomly drawn separator performs better than human-curated separators. These observations challenge the common assumption that an effective prompt should be human readable or task relevant and establish a strong baseline for prompt optimisation research.

In this paper, we present a prompting framework called LLMCS that leverages large language models, such as code-davinci-002 of GPT-3, to perform few-shot conversational query rewriting for conversational search. We explore three prompting methods to generate multiple query rewrites and hypothetical responses, and propose aggregating them into an integrated representation that can robustly represent the user's real contextual search intent. Experimental results on two conversational search datasets, including CAst-19 and CAsT-20, show that our approach achieves significant improvements in search effectiveness over existing baselines and manual rewrites. Notably, LLMCS can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art baselines by up to +5.9\% and +32.9\% w.r.t. NDCG@3 on CAsT-19 and CAsT-20, highlighting the vast potential of large language models for conversational search. Our code will be released at https://github.com/kyriemao/LLMCS.

Generative retrieval (GR) differs from the traditional index-then-retrieve pipeline by storing relevance in model parameters and generating retrieval cues directly from the query, but it can be brittle out of domain and expensive to scale. We introduce QueStER (QUEry SpecificaTion for gEnerative Keyword-Based Retrieval), which bridges GR and query reformulation by learning to generate explicit keyword-based search specifications. Given a user query, a lightweight LLM produces a keyword query that is executed by a standard retriever (BM25), combining the generalization benefits of generative query rewriting with the efficiency and scalability of lexical indexing. We train the rewriting policy with reinforcement learning techniques. Across in- and out-of-domain evaluations, QueStER consistently improves over BM25 and is competitive with neural IR baselines, while maintaining strong efficiency.

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.

The advancement of natural language processing (NLP) has been significantly boosted by the development of transformer-based large language models (LLMs). These models have revolutionized NLP tasks, particularly in code generation, aiding developers in creating software with enhanced efficiency. Despite their advancements, challenges in balancing code snippet generation with effective test case generation and execution persist. To address these issues, this paper introduces Multi-Agent Assistant Code Generation (AgentCoder), a novel solution comprising a multi-agent framework with specialized agents: the programmer agent, the test designer agent, and the test executor agent. During the coding procedure, the programmer agent will focus on the code generation and refinement based on the test executor agent's feedback. The test designer agent will generate test cases for the generated code, and the test executor agent will run the code with the test cases and write the feedback to the programmer. This collaborative system ensures robust code generation, surpassing the limitations of single-agent models and traditional methodologies. Our extensive experiments on 9 code generation models and 12 enhancement approaches showcase AgentCoder's superior performance over existing code generation models and prompt engineering techniques across various benchmarks. For example, AgentCoder achieves 77.4% and 89.1% pass@1 in HumanEval-ET and MBPP-ET with GPT-3.5, while SOTA baselines obtain only 69.5% and 63.0%.

Machine learning models have been shown to inherit biases from their training datasets. This can be particularly problematic for vision-language foundation models trained on uncurated datasets scraped from the internet. The biases can be amplified and propagated to downstream applications like zero-shot classifiers and text-to-image generative models. In this study, we propose a general approach for debiasing vision-language foundation models by projecting out biased directions in the text embedding. In particular, we show that debiasing only the text embedding with a calibrated projection matrix suffices to yield robust classifiers and fair generative models. The proposed closed-form solution enables easy integration into large-scale pipelines, and empirical results demonstrate that our approach effectively reduces social bias and spurious correlation in both discriminative and generative vision-language models without the need for additional data or training.

The current use of large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot document ranking follows one of two ways: 1) prompt-based re-ranking methods, which require no further training but are feasible for only re-ranking a handful of candidate documents due to the associated computational costs; and 2) unsupervised contrastive trained dense retrieval methods, which can retrieve relevant documents from the entire corpus but require a large amount of paired text data for contrastive training. In this paper, we propose PromptReps, which combines the advantages of both categories: no need for training and the ability to retrieve from the whole corpus. Our method only requires prompts to guide an LLM to generate query and document representations for effective document retrieval. Specifically, we prompt the LLMs to represent a given text using a single word, and then use the last token's hidden states and the corresponding logits associated to the prediction of the next token to construct a hybrid document retrieval system. The retrieval system harnesses both dense text embedding and sparse bag-of-words representations given by the LLM. Our experimental evaluation on the BEIR zero-shot document retrieval datasets illustrates that this simple prompt-based LLM retrieval method can achieve a similar or higher retrieval effectiveness than state-of-the-art LLM embedding methods that are trained with large amounts of unsupervised data, especially when using a larger LLM.

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.

A major obstacle to the wide-spread adoption of neural retrieval models is that they require large supervised training sets to surpass traditional term-based techniques, which are constructed from raw corpora. In this paper, we propose an approach to zero-shot learning for passage retrieval that uses synthetic question generation to close this gap. The question generation system is trained on general domain data, but is applied to documents in the targeted domain. This allows us to create arbitrarily large, yet noisy, question-passage relevance pairs that are domain specific. Furthermore, when this is coupled with a simple hybrid term-neural model, first-stage retrieval performance can be improved further. Empirically, we show that this is an effective strategy for building neural passage retrieval models in the absence of large training corpora. Depending on the domain, this technique can even approach the accuracy of supervised models.

Large language models (LLMs) are highly capable at a variety of tasks given the right prompt, but writing one is still a difficult and tedious process. In this work, we introduce ConstitutionalExperts, a method for learning a prompt consisting of constitutional principles (i.e. rules), given a training dataset. Unlike prior methods that optimize the prompt as a single entity, our method incrementally improves the prompt by surgically editing individual principles. We also show that we can improve overall performance by learning unique prompts for different semantic regions of the training data and using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to route inputs at inference time. We compare our method to other state of the art prompt-optimization techniques across six benchmark datasets. We also investigate whether MoE improves these other techniques. Our results suggest that ConstitutionalExperts outperforms other prompt optimization techniques by 10.9% (F1) and that mixture-of-experts improves all techniques, suggesting its broad applicability.

Existing neural ranking models follow the text matching paradigm, where document-to-query relevance is estimated through predicting the matching score. Drawing from the rich literature of classical generative retrieval models, we introduce and formalize the paradigm of deep generative retrieval models defined via the cumulative probabilities of generating query terms. This paradigm offers a grounded probabilistic view on relevance estimation while still enabling the use of modern neural architectures. In contrast to the matching paradigm, the probabilistic nature of generative rankers readily offers a fine-grained measure of uncertainty. We adopt several current neural generative models in our framework and introduce a novel generative ranker (T-PGN), which combines the encoding capacity of Transformers with the Pointer Generator Network model. We conduct an extensive set of evaluation experiments on passage retrieval, leveraging the MS MARCO Passage Re-ranking and TREC Deep Learning 2019 Passage Re-ranking collections. Our results show the significantly higher performance of the T-PGN model when compared with other generative models. Lastly, we demonstrate that exploiting the uncertainty information of deep generative rankers opens new perspectives to query/collection understanding, and significantly improves the cut-off prediction task.

Current query expansion models use pseudo-relevance feedback to improve first-pass retrieval effectiveness; however, this fails when the initial results are not relevant. Instead of building a language model from retrieved results, we propose Generative Relevance Feedback (GRF) that builds probabilistic feedback models from long-form text generated from Large Language Models. We study the effective methods for generating text by varying the zero-shot generation subtasks: queries, entities, facts, news articles, documents, and essays. We evaluate GRF on document retrieval benchmarks covering a diverse set of queries and document collections, and the results show that GRF methods significantly outperform previous PRF methods. Specifically, we improve MAP between 5-19% and NDCG@10 17-24% compared to RM3 expansion, and achieve the best R@1k effectiveness on all datasets compared to state-of-the-art sparse, dense, and expansion models.

Much recent research on information retrieval has focused on how to transfer from one task (typically with abundant supervised data) to various other tasks where supervision is limited, with the implicit assumption that it is possible to generalize from one task to all the rest. However, this overlooks the fact that there are many diverse and unique retrieval tasks, each targeting different search intents, queries, and search domains. In this paper, we suggest to work on Few-shot Dense Retrieval, a setting where each task comes with a short description and a few examples. To amplify the power of a few examples, we propose Prompt-base Query Generation for Retriever (Promptagator), which leverages large language models (LLM) as a few-shot query generator, and creates task-specific retrievers based on the generated data. Powered by LLM's generalization ability, Promptagator makes it possible to create task-specific end-to-end retrievers solely based on a few examples {without} using Natural Questions or MS MARCO to train %question generators or dual encoders. Surprisingly, LLM prompting with no more than 8 examples allows dual encoders to outperform heavily engineered models trained on MS MARCO like ColBERT v2 by more than 1.2 nDCG on average on 11 retrieval sets. Further training standard-size re-rankers using the same generated data yields another 5.0 point nDCG improvement. Our studies determine that query generation can be far more effective than previously observed, especially when a small amount of task-specific knowledge is given.

Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with web search capabilities have demonstrated impressive potential for deep research tasks. However, current approaches predominantly rely on either manually engineered prompts (prompt engineering-based) with brittle performance or reinforcement learning within controlled Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) environments (RAG-based) that fail to capture the complexities of real-world interaction. In this paper, we introduce DeepResearcher, the first comprehensive framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based deep research agents through scaling reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments with authentic web search interactions. Unlike RAG-based approaches that assume all necessary information exists within a fixed corpus, our method trains agents to navigate the noisy, unstructured, and dynamic nature of the open web. We implement a specialized multi-agent architecture where browsing agents extract relevant information from various webpage structures and overcoming significant technical challenges. Extensive experiments on open-domain research tasks demonstrate that DeepResearcher achieves substantial improvements of up to 28.9 points over prompt engineering-based baselines and up to 7.2 points over RAG-based RL agents. Our qualitative analysis reveals emergent cognitive behaviors from end-to-end RL training, including the ability to formulate plans, cross-validate information from multiple sources, engage in self-reflection to redirect research, and maintain honesty when unable to find definitive answers. Our results highlight that end-to-end training in real-world web environments is not merely an implementation detail but a fundamental requirement for developing robust research capabilities aligned with real-world applications. We release DeepResearcher at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DeepResearcher.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is central to training modern reasoning models, but the undisclosed training data raises concerns about benchmark contamination. Unlike pretraining methods, which optimize models using token-level probabilities, RLVR fine-tunes models based on reward feedback from self-generated reasoning trajectories, making conventional likelihood-based detection methods less effective. We show that RLVR induces a distinctive behavioral signature: prompts encountered during RLVR training result in more rigid and similar generations, while unseen prompts retain greater diversity. We introduce Min-kNN Distance, a simple black-box detector that quantifies this collapse by sampling multiple completions for a given prompt and computing the average of the k smallest nearest-neighbor edit distances. Min-kNN Distance requires no access to the reference model or token probabilities. Experiments across multiple RLVR-trained reasoning models show that Min-kNN Distance reliably distinguishes RL-seen examples from unseen ones and outperforms existing membership inference and RL contamination detection baselines.

Prompting is a mainstream paradigm for adapting large language models to specific natural language processing tasks without modifying internal parameters. Therefore, detailed supplementary knowledge needs to be integrated into external prompts, which inevitably brings extra human efforts and computational burdens for practical applications. As an effective solution to mitigate resource consumption, Efficient Prompting Methods have attracted a wide range of attention. We provide mathematical expressions at a high level to deeply discuss Automatic Prompt Engineering for different prompt components and Prompt Compression in continuous and discrete spaces. Finally, we highlight promising future directions to inspire researchers interested in this field.

Generative models for Information Retrieval, where ranking of documents is viewed as the task of generating a query from a document's language model, were very successful in various IR tasks in the past. However, with the advent of modern deep neural networks, attention has shifted to discriminative ranking functions that model the semantic similarity of documents and queries instead. Recently, deep generative models such as GPT2 and BART have been shown to be excellent text generators, but their effectiveness as rankers have not been demonstrated yet. In this work, we revisit the generative framework for information retrieval and show that our generative approaches are as effective as state-of-the-art semantic similarity-based discriminative models for the answer selection task. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of unlikelihood losses for IR.

Dense passage retrieval aims to retrieve the relevant passages of a query from a large corpus based on dense representations (i.e., vectors) of the query and the passages. Recent studies have explored improving pre-trained language models to boost dense retrieval performance. This paper proposes CoT-MAE (ConTextual Masked Auto-Encoder), a simple yet effective generative pre-training method for dense passage retrieval. CoT-MAE employs an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture that learns to compress the sentence semantics into a dense vector through self-supervised and context-supervised masked auto-encoding. Precisely, self-supervised masked auto-encoding learns to model the semantics of the tokens inside a text span, and context-supervised masked auto-encoding learns to model the semantical correlation between the text spans. We conduct experiments on large-scale passage retrieval benchmarks and show considerable improvements over strong baselines, demonstrating the high efficiency of CoT-MAE. Our code is available at https://github.com/caskcsg/ir/tree/main/cotmae.

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.

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.

We propose a novel prompt design paradigm that challenges conventional wisdom in large language model (LLM) prompting. While conventional wisdom prioritizes well-crafted instructions and demonstrations for in-context learning (ICL), we show that pruning random demonstrations into seemingly incoherent "gibberish" can remarkably improve performance across diverse tasks. Notably, the "gibberish" always matches or surpasses state-of-the-art automatic prompt optimization techniques, achieving substantial gains regardless of LLM alignment. Nevertheless, discovering an effective pruning strategy is non-trivial, as existing attribution methods and prompt compression algorithms fail to deliver robust results, let alone human intuition. In terms of this, we propose a self-discover prompt optimization framework, PromptQuine, an evolutionary search framework that automatically searches for the pruning strategy by itself using only low-data regimes. Much like the emergent complexity in nature--such as symbiosis and self-organization--arising in response to resource constraints, our framework evolves and refines unconventional yet highly effective prompts by leveraging only the tokens present within the context. We demonstrate its effectiveness across classification, multi-choice question answering, generation and math reasoning tasks across LLMs, while achieving decent runtime efficiency. We hope our findings can guide mechanistic studies on in-context learning, and provide a call to action, to pave the way for more open-ended search algorithms for more effective LLM prompting.

Knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILT) usually require a large body of information to provide correct answers. A popular paradigm to solve this problem is to combine a search system with a machine reader, where the former retrieves supporting evidences and the latter examines them to produce answers. Recently, the reader component has witnessed significant advances with the help of large-scale pre-trained generative models. Meanwhile most existing solutions in the search component rely on the traditional ``index-retrieve-then-rank'' pipeline, which suffers from large memory footprint and difficulty in end-to-end optimization. Inspired by recent efforts in constructing model-based IR models, we propose to replace the traditional multi-step search pipeline with a novel single-step generative model, which can dramatically simplify the search process and be optimized in an end-to-end manner. We show that a strong generative retrieval model can be learned with a set of adequately designed pre-training tasks, and be adopted to improve a variety of downstream KILT tasks with further fine-tuning. We name the pre-trained generative retrieval model as CorpusBrain as all information about the corpus is encoded in its parameters without the need of constructing additional index. Empirical results show that CorpusBrain can significantly outperform strong baselines for the retrieval task on the KILT benchmark and establish new state-of-the-art downstream performances. We also show that CorpusBrain works well under zero- and low-resource settings.

Existing text simplification or paraphrase datasets mainly focus on sentence-level text generation in a general domain. These datasets are typically developed without using domain knowledge. In this paper, we release a novel dataset, VTechAGP, which is the first academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset consisting of 4,938 document-level these and dissertation academic and general-audience abstract pairs from 8 colleges authored over 25 years. We also propose a novel dynamic soft prompt generative language model, DSPT5. For training, we leverage a contrastive-generative loss function to learn the keyword vectors in the dynamic prompt. For inference, we adopt a crowd-sampling decoding strategy at both semantic and structural levels to further select the best output candidate. We evaluate DSPT5 and various state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) from multiple perspectives. Results demonstrate that the SOTA LLMs does not provide satisfactory outcomes, while the lightweight DSPT5 can achieve competitive results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to build a benchmark dataset and solutions for academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset.

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.

Tailoring structured financial reports from companies' earnings releases is crucial for understanding financial performance and has been widely adopted in real-world analytics. However, existing summarization methods often generate broad, high-level summaries, which may lack the precision and detail required for financial reports that typically focus on specific, structured sections. While Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise, generating reports adhering to predefined multi-section templates remains challenging. This paper investigates two LLM-based approaches popular in industry for generating templated financial reports: an agentic information retrieval (IR) framework and a decomposed IR approach, namely AgenticIR and DecomposedIR. The AgenticIR utilizes collaborative agents prompted with the full template. In contrast, the DecomposedIR approach applies a prompt chaining workflow to break down the template and reframe each section as a query answered by the LLM using the earnings release. To quantitatively assess the generated reports, we evaluated both methods in two scenarios: one using a financial dataset without direct human references, and another with a weather-domain dataset featuring expert-written reports. Experimental results show that while AgenticIR may excel in orchestrating tasks and generating concise reports through agent collaboration, DecomposedIR statistically significantly outperforms AgenticIR approach in providing broader and more detailed coverage in both scenarios, offering reflection on the utilization of the agentic framework in real-world applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of applications, e.g., medical question-answering, mathematical sciences, and code generation. However, they also exhibit inherent limitations, such as outdated knowledge and susceptibility to hallucinations. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising paradigm to address these issues, but it also introduces new vulnerabilities. Recent efforts have focused on the security of RAG-based LLMs, yet existing attack methods face three critical challenges: (1) their effectiveness declines sharply when only a limited number of poisoned texts can be injected into the knowledge database, (2) they lack sufficient stealth, as the attacks are often detectable by anomaly detection systems, which compromises their effectiveness, and (3) they rely on heuristic approaches to generate poisoned texts, lacking formal optimization frameworks and theoretic guarantees, which limits their effectiveness and applicability. To address these issues, we propose coordinated Prompt-RAG attack (PR-attack), a novel optimization-driven attack that introduces a small number of poisoned texts into the knowledge database while embedding a backdoor trigger within the prompt. When activated, the trigger causes the LLM to generate pre-designed responses to targeted queries, while maintaining normal behavior in other contexts. This ensures both high effectiveness and stealth. We formulate the attack generation process as a bilevel optimization problem leveraging a principled optimization framework to develop optimal poisoned texts and triggers. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PR-Attack, achieving a high attack success rate even with a limited number of poisoned texts and significantly improved stealth compared to existing methods.

We develop a method for training small-scale (under 100M parameter) neural information retrieval models with as few as 10 gold relevance labels. The method depends on generating synthetic queries for documents using a language model (LM), and the key step is that we automatically optimize the LM prompt that is used to generate these queries based on training quality. In experiments with the BIRCO benchmark, we find that models trained with our method outperform RankZephyr and are competitive with RankLLama, both of which are 7B parameter models trained on over 100K labels. These findings point to the power of automatic prompt optimization for synthetic dataset generation.

Recent advances in large-scale pre-training such as GPT-3 allow seemingly high quality text to be generated from a given prompt. However, such generation systems often suffer from problems of hallucinated facts, and are not inherently designed to incorporate useful external information. Grounded generation models appear to offer remedies, but their training typically relies on rarely-available parallel data where information-relevant documents are provided for context. We propose a framework that alleviates this data constraint by jointly training a grounded generator and document retriever on the language model signal. The model learns to reward retrieval of the documents with the highest utility in generation, and attentively combines them using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) ensemble to generate follow-on text. We demonstrate that both generator and retriever can take advantage of this joint training and work synergistically to produce more informative and relevant text in both prose and dialogue generation.

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.

Information Retrieval (IR) systems are crucial tools for users to access information, which have long been dominated by traditional methods relying on similarity matching. With the advancement of pre-trained language models, generative information retrieval (GenIR) emerges as a novel paradigm, attracting increasing attention. Based on the form of information provided to users, current research in GenIR can be categorized into two aspects: (1) Generative Document Retrieval (GR) leverages the generative model's parameters for memorizing documents, enabling retrieval by directly generating relevant document identifiers without explicit indexing. (2) Reliable Response Generation employs language models to directly generate information users seek, breaking the limitations of traditional IR in terms of document granularity and relevance matching while offering flexibility, efficiency, and creativity to meet practical needs. This paper aims to systematically review the latest research progress in GenIR. We will summarize the advancements in GR regarding model training and structure, document identifier, incremental learning, etc., as well as progress in reliable response generation in aspects of internal knowledge memorization, external knowledge augmentation, etc. We also review the evaluation, challenges and future developments in GenIR systems. This review aims to offer a comprehensive reference for researchers, encouraging further development in the GenIR field. Github Repository: https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/GenIR-Survey

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.

This paper introduces 26 guiding principles designed to streamline the process of querying and prompting large language models. Our goal is to simplify the underlying concepts of formulating questions for various scales of large language models, examining their abilities, and enhancing user comprehension on the behaviors of different scales of large language models when feeding into different prompts. Extensive experiments are conducted on LLaMA-1/2 (7B, 13B and 70B), GPT-3.5/4 to verify the effectiveness of the proposed principles on instructions and prompts design. We hope that this work can provide a better guide for researchers working on the prompting of large language models. Project page is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ATLAS.

Text ranking is a critical task in various information retrieval applications, and the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural language processing has sparked interest in their application to text ranking. These methods primarily involve combining query and candidate documents and leveraging prompt learning to determine query-document relevance using the LLM's output probabilities for specific tokens or by directly generating a ranked list of candidate documents. Although these approaches have demonstrated promise, a noteworthy disparity arises between the training objective of LLMs, which typically centers around next token prediction, and the objective of evaluating query-document relevance. To address this gap and fully leverage LLM potential in text ranking tasks, we propose a progressive multi-stage training strategy. Firstly, we introduce a large-scale weakly supervised dataset of relevance texts to enable the LLMs to acquire the ability to predict relevant tokens without altering their original training objective. Subsequently, we incorporate supervised training to further enhance LLM ranking capability. Our experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to previous competitive approaches, both in in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios.

Retrieval-augmented generation resorts to content retrieved from external sources in order to leverage the performance of large language models in downstream tasks. The excessive volume of retrieved content, the possible dispersion of its parts, or their out of focus range may happen nevertheless to eventually have a detrimental rather than an incremental effect. To mitigate this issue and improve retrieval-augmented generation, we propose a method to refine the retrieved content before it is included in the prompt by resorting to meta-prompting optimization. Put to empirical test with the demanding multi-hop question answering task from the StrategyQA dataset, the evaluation results indicate that this method outperforms a similar retrieval-augmented system but without this method by over 30%.

Recently, prompt-based methods have achieved significant performance in few-shot learning scenarios by bridging the gap between language model pre-training and fine-tuning for downstream tasks. However, existing prompt templates are mostly designed for sentence-level tasks and are inappropriate for sequence labeling objectives. To address the above issue, we propose a multi-task instruction-based generative framework, named InstructionNER, for low-resource named entity recognition. Specifically, we reformulate the NER task as a generation problem, which enriches source sentences with task-specific instructions and answer options, then inferences the entities and types in natural language. We further propose two auxiliary tasks, including entity extraction and entity typing, which enable the model to capture more boundary information of entities and deepen the understanding of entity type semantics, respectively. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines on five datasets in few-shot settings.

This work delved into the realm of automatic text generation, exploring a variety of techniques ranging from traditional deterministic approaches to more modern stochastic methods. Through analysis of greedy search, beam search, top-k sampling, top-p sampling, contrastive searching, and locally typical searching, this work has provided valuable insights into the strengths, weaknesses, and potential applications of each method. Each text-generating method is evaluated using several standard metrics and a comparative study has been made on the performance of the approaches. Finally, some future directions of research in the field of automatic text generation are also identified.

Legal Passage Retrieval (LPR) systems are crucial as they help practitioners save time when drafting legal arguments. However, it remains an underexplored avenue. One primary reason is the significant vocabulary mismatch between the query and the target passage. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, the Generative query REwriter (GuRE). We leverage the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by training the LLM for query rewriting. "Rewritten queries" help retrievers to retrieve target passages by mitigating vocabulary mismatch. Experimental results show that GuRE significantly improves performance in a retriever-agnostic manner, outperforming all baseline methods. Further analysis reveals that different training objectives lead to distinct retrieval behaviors, making GuRE more suitable than direct retriever fine-tuning for real-world applications. Codes are avaiable at github.com/daehuikim/GuRE.

Humans can reason compositionally when presented with new tasks. Previous research shows that appropriate prompting techniques enable large language models (LLMs) to solve artificial compositional generalization tasks such as SCAN. In this work, we identify additional challenges in more realistic semantic parsing tasks with larger vocabulary and refine these prompting techniques to address them. Our best method is based on least-to-most prompting: it decomposes the problem using prompting-based syntactic parsing, then uses this decomposition to select appropriate exemplars and to sequentially generate the semantic parse. This method allows us to set a new state of the art for CFQ while requiring only 1% of the training data used by traditional approaches. Due to the general nature of our approach, we expect similar efforts will lead to new results in other tasks and domains, especially for knowledge-intensive applications.

Instruction-tuned language models (LM) are able to respond to imperative commands, providing a more natural user interface compared to their base counterparts. In this work, we present Promptriever, the first retrieval model able to be prompted like an LM. To train Promptriever, we curate and release a new instance-level instruction training set from MS MARCO, spanning nearly 500k instances. Promptriever not only achieves strong performance on standard retrieval tasks, but also follows instructions. We observe: (1) large gains (reaching SoTA) on following detailed relevance instructions (+14.3 p-MRR / +3.1 nDCG on FollowIR), (2) significantly increased robustness to lexical choices/phrasing in the query+instruction (+12.9 Robustness@10 on InstructIR), and (3) the ability to perform hyperparameter search via prompting to reliably improve retrieval performance (+1.4 average increase on BEIR). Promptriever demonstrates that retrieval models can be controlled with prompts on a per-query basis, setting the stage for future work aligning LM prompting techniques with information retrieval.

Citations in scientific papers not only help us trace the intellectual lineage but also are a useful indicator of the scientific significance of the work. Citation intents prove beneficial as they specify the role of the citation in a given context. In this paper, we present CitePrompt, a framework which uses the hitherto unexplored approach of prompt-based learning for citation intent classification. We argue that with the proper choice of the pretrained language model, the prompt template, and the prompt verbalizer, we can not only get results that are better than or comparable to those obtained with the state-of-the-art methods but also do it with much less exterior information about the scientific document. We report state-of-the-art results on the ACL-ARC dataset, and also show significant improvement on the SciCite dataset over all baseline models except one. As suitably large labelled datasets for citation intent classification can be quite hard to find, in a first, we propose the conversion of this task to the few-shot and zero-shot settings. For the ACL-ARC dataset, we report a 53.86% F1 score for the zero-shot setting, which improves to 63.61% and 66.99% for the 5-shot and 10-shot settings, respectively.

Generative search engines directly generate responses to user queries, along with in-line citations. A prerequisite trait of a trustworthy generative search engine is verifiability, i.e., systems should cite comprehensively (high citation recall; all statements are fully supported by citations) and accurately (high citation precision; every cite supports its associated statement). We conduct human evaluation to audit four popular generative search engines -- Bing Chat, NeevaAI, perplexity.ai, and YouChat -- across a diverse set of queries from a variety of sources (e.g., historical Google user queries, dynamically-collected open-ended questions on Reddit, etc.). We find that responses from existing generative search engines are fluent and appear informative, but frequently contain unsupported statements and inaccurate citations: on average, a mere 51.5% of generated sentences are fully supported by citations and only 74.5% of citations support their associated sentence. We believe that these results are concerningly low for systems that may serve as a primary tool for information-seeking users, especially given their facade of trustworthiness. We hope that our results further motivate the development of trustworthy generative search engines and help researchers and users better understand the shortcomings of existing commercial systems.

Query Reformulation (QR) is a set of techniques used to transform a user's original search query to a text that better aligns with the user's intent and improves their search experience. Recently, zero-shot QR has been a promising approach due to its ability to exploit knowledge inherent in large language models. Inspired by the success of ensemble prompting strategies which have benefited other tasks, we investigate if they can improve query reformulation. In this context, we propose two ensemble-based prompting techniques, GenQREnsemble and GenQRFusion which leverage paraphrases of a zero-shot instruction to generate multiple sets of keywords to improve retrieval performance ultimately. We further introduce their post-retrieval variants to incorporate relevance feedback from a variety of sources, including an oracle simulating a human user and a "critic" LLM. We demonstrate that an ensemble of query reformulations can improve retrieval effectiveness by up to 18% on nDCG@10 in pre-retrieval settings and 9% on post-retrieval settings on multiple benchmarks, outperforming all previously reported SOTA results. We perform subsequent analyses to investigate the effects of feedback documents, incorporate domain-specific instructions, filter reformulations, and generate fluent reformulations that might be more beneficial to human searchers. Together, the techniques and the results presented in this paper establish a new state of the art in automated query reformulation for retrieval and suggest promising directions for future research.

Conditional story generation is significant in human-machine interaction, particularly in producing stories with complex plots. While Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multiple NLP tasks, including story generation, it is challenging to generate stories with both complex and creative plots. Existing methods often rely on detailed prompts to guide LLMs to meet target conditions, which inadvertently restrict the creative potential of the generated stories. We argue that leveraging information from exemplary human-written stories facilitates generating more diverse plotlines. Delving deeper into story details helps build complex and credible plots. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-auGmented stoRy generation framework with a fOrest of eVidEnce (GROVE) to enhance stories' complexity. We build a retrieval repository for target conditions to produce few-shot examples to prompt LLMs. Additionally, we design an ``asking-why'' prompting scheme that extracts a forest of evidence, providing compensation for the ambiguities that may occur in the generated story. This iterative process uncovers underlying story backgrounds. Finally, we select the most fitting chains of evidence from the evidence forest and integrate them into the generated story, thereby enhancing the narrative's complexity and credibility. Experimental results and numerous examples verify the effectiveness of our method.

This paper introduces InstUPR, an unsupervised passage reranking method based on large language models (LLMs). Different from existing approaches that rely on extensive training with query-document pairs or retrieval-specific instructions, our method leverages the instruction-following capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs for passage reranking without any additional fine-tuning. To achieve this, we introduce a soft score aggregation technique and employ pairwise reranking for unsupervised passage reranking. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate that InstUPR outperforms unsupervised baselines as well as an instruction-tuned reranker, highlighting its effectiveness and superiority. Source code to reproduce all experiments is open-sourced at https://github.com/MiuLab/InstUPR

Recent progress in generative models, especially in text-guided diffusion models, has enabled the production of aesthetically-pleasing imagery resembling the works of professional human artists. However, one has to carefully compose the textual description, called the prompt, and augment it with a set of clarifying keywords. Since aesthetics are challenging to evaluate computationally, human feedback is needed to determine the optimal prompt formulation and keyword combination. In this paper, we present a human-in-the-loop approach to learning the most useful combination of prompt keywords using a genetic algorithm. We also show how such an approach can improve the aesthetic appeal of images depicting the same descriptions.

We conduct a feasibility study into the applicability of answer-agnostic question generation models to textbook passages. We show that a significant portion of errors in such systems arise from asking irrelevant or uninterpretable questions and that such errors can be ameliorated by providing summarized input. We find that giving these models human-written summaries instead of the original text results in a significant increase in acceptability of generated questions (33% rightarrow 83%) as determined by expert annotators. We also find that, in the absence of human-written summaries, automatic summarization can serve as a good middle ground.

Neural networks -- especially those that use large, pre-trained language models -- have improved search engines in various ways. Most prominently, they can estimate the relevance of a passage or document to a user's query. In this work, we depart from this direction by exploring whether neural networks can effectively predict which of a document's passages are unlikely to be relevant to any query submitted to the search engine. We refer to this query-agnostic estimation of passage relevance as a passage's quality. We find that our novel methods for estimating passage quality allow passage corpora to be pruned considerably while maintaining statistically equivalent effectiveness; our best methods can consistently prune >25% of passages in a corpora, across various retrieval pipelines. Such substantial pruning reduces the operating costs of neural search engines in terms of computing resources, power usage, and carbon footprint -- both when processing queries (thanks to a smaller index size) and when indexing (lightweight models can prune low-quality passages prior to the costly dense or learned sparse encoding step). This work sets the stage for developing more advanced neural "learning-what-to-index" methods.

With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), many researchers are attempting to extract structured information from document-level biomedical literature by fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, they face significant challenges such as the need for expensive hardware, like high-performance GPUs and the high labor costs associated with annotating training datasets, especially in biomedical realm. Recent research on LLMs, such as GPT-4 and Llama3, has shown promising performance in zero-shot settings, inspiring us to explore a novel approach to achieve the same results from unannotated full documents using general LLMs with lower hardware and labor costs. Our approach combines two major stages: named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE). NER identifies chemical, disease and gene entities from the document with synonym and hypernym extraction using an LLM with a crafted prompt. RE extracts relations between entities based on predefined relation schemas and prompts. To enhance the effectiveness of prompt, we propose a five-part template structure and a scenario-based prompt design principles, along with evaluation method to systematically assess the prompts. Finally, we evaluated our approach against fine-tuning and pre-trained models on two biomedical datasets: ChemDisGene and CDR. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method can achieve comparable accuracy levels to fine-tuning and pre-trained models but with reduced human and hardware expenses.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) had a transformative impact on search, ushering in a new era of search engines that are capable of generating search results in natural language text, imbued with citations for supporting sources. Building generative information-seeking models demands openly accessible datasets, which currently remain lacking. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, HAGRID (Human-in-the-loop Attributable Generative Retrieval for Information-seeking Dataset) for building end-to-end generative information-seeking models that are capable of retrieving candidate quotes and generating attributed explanations. Unlike recent efforts that focus on human evaluation of black-box proprietary search engines, we built our dataset atop the English subset of MIRACL, a publicly available information retrieval dataset. HAGRID is constructed based on human and LLM collaboration. We first automatically collect attributed explanations that follow an in-context citation style using an LLM, i.e. GPT-3.5. Next, we ask human annotators to evaluate the LLM explanations based on two criteria: informativeness and attributability. HAGRID serves as a catalyst for the development of information-seeking models with better attribution capabilities.

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.

Denoising in the sRGB image space is challenging due to large noise variability. Although end-to-end methods perform well, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios is limited by the scarcity of real noisy-clean image pairs, which are expensive and difficult to collect. To address this limitation, several generative methods have been developed to synthesize realistic noisy images from limited data. These approaches often rely on camera metadata during both training and testing to synthesize real-world noise. However, the lack of metadata or inconsistencies between devices restricts their usability. Therefore, we propose a novel framework called Prompt-Driven Noise Generation (PNG). This model is capable of acquiring high-dimensional prompt features that capture the characteristics of real-world input noise and creating a variety of realistic noisy images consistent with the distribution of the input noise. By eliminating the dependency on explicit camera metadata, our approach significantly enhances the generalizability and applicability of noise synthesis. Comprehensive experiments reveal that our model effectively produces realistic noisy images and show the successful application of these generated images in removing real-world noise across various benchmark datasets.

Visual generators excel at rendering, but they confidently fabricate what they do not know. User requests are unbounded, evolving, and deeply long-tailed: new characters, trending entities, post-cutoff events, and more. This world-knowledge bottleneck is structural: generators are trained on fixed corpora, but the visual world is open-ended. We construct SearchGen-20K and SearchGen-Bench, with 20,839 prompts spanning twelve failure categories and twenty-two domains, paired with a pre-executed multimodal SearchGen-Corpus-1M to support offline, reproducible research. On SearchGen-Bench, frontier open generators score only 21 to 28 out of 100, a 40-point collapse invisible to existing benchmarks. The natural remedy is to employ search tools, enabling agentic visual generation. However, we find that naive search fails: it retrieves indiscriminately, injecting noise into prompts the generator already handles. We trace the root cause to a generator-specific, evolving knowledge boundary: the divide between what a generator can internalize through training and what must remain in external context. Although this boundary is hard to specify in advance, we show that it is discoverable through a teach-then-search co-training framework. Even a minimal version of this co-training recipe produces monotonic improvement, laying the foundation for recursive self-improvement in visual generation that can meet world-knowledge-grounded requests. We release the full dataset, co-training corpus, and search corpus as a replayable harness for tool-augmented, world-knowledge-grounded visual generation.

Extracting sentence embeddings from large language models (LLMs) is a practical direction, as it requires neither additional data nor fine-tuning. Previous studies usually focus on prompt engineering to guide LLMs to encode the core semantic information of the sentence into the embedding of the last token. However, the last token in these methods still encodes an excess of non-essential information, such as stop words, limiting its encoding capacity. To this end, we propose a Contrastive Prompting (CP) method that introduces an extra auxiliary prompt to elicit better sentence embedding. By contrasting with the auxiliary prompt, CP can steer existing prompts to encode the core semantics of the sentence, rather than non-essential information. CP is a plug-and-play inference-time intervention method that can be combined with various prompt-based methods. Extensive experiments on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks and downstream classification tasks demonstrate that our method can improve the performance of existing prompt-based methods across different LLMs. Our code will be released at https://github.com/zifengcheng/CP.

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.

Evaluating LLMs with a single prompt has proven unreliable, with small changes leading to significant performance differences. However, generating the prompt variations needed for a more robust multi-prompt evaluation is challenging, limiting its adoption in practice. To address this, we introduce PromptSuite, a framework that enables the automatic generation of various prompts. PromptSuite is flexible - working out of the box on a wide range of tasks and benchmarks. It follows a modular prompt design, allowing controlled perturbations to each component, and is extensible, supporting the addition of new components and perturbation types. Through a series of case studies, we show that PromptSuite provides meaningful variations to support strong evaluation practices. It is available through both a Python API: https://github.com/eliyahabba/PromptSuite, and a user-friendly web interface: https://promptsuite.streamlit.app/

The increased interest in diffusion models has opened up opportunities for advancements in generative text modeling. These models can produce impressive images when given a well-crafted prompt, but creating a powerful or meaningful prompt can be hit-or-miss. To address this, we have created a large-scale dataset that is derived and synthesized from real prompts and indexed with popular image-text datasets such as MS-COCO and Flickr. We have also implemented stages that gradually reduce context and increase complexity, which will further enhance the output due to the complex annotations created. The dataset, called MTTN, includes over 2.4 million sentences divided into 5 stages, resulting in a total of over 12 million pairs, and a vocabulary of over 300,000 unique words, providing ample variation. The original 2.4 million pairs are designed to reflect the way language is used on the internet globally, making the dataset more robust for any model trained on it.

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best with well-crafted prompts, yet prompt engineering remains manual, inconsistent, and inaccessible to non-experts. We introduce Promptomatix, an automatic prompt optimization framework that transforms natural language task descriptions into high-quality prompts without requiring manual tuning or domain expertise. Promptomatix supports both a lightweight meta-prompt-based optimizer and a DSPy-powered compiler, with modular design enabling future extension to more advanced frameworks. The system analyzes user intent, generates synthetic training data, selects prompting strategies, and refines prompts using cost-aware objectives. Evaluated across 5 task categories, Promptomatix achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing libraries, while reducing prompt length and computational overhead making prompt optimization scalable and efficient.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems represent a significant advancement over traditional Large Language Models (LLMs). RAG systems enhance their generation ability by incorporating external data retrieved through an Information Retrieval (IR) phase, overcoming the limitations of standard LLMs, which are restricted to their pre-trained knowledge and limited context window. Most research in this area has predominantly concentrated on the generative aspect of LLMs within RAG systems. Our study fills this gap by thoroughly and critically analyzing the influence of IR components on RAG systems. This paper analyzes which characteristics a retriever should possess for an effective RAG's prompt formulation, focusing on the type of documents that should be retrieved. We evaluate various elements, such as the relevance of the documents to the prompt, their position, and the number included in the context. Our findings reveal, among other insights, that including irrelevant documents can unexpectedly enhance performance by more than 30% in accuracy, contradicting our initial assumption of diminished quality. These results underscore the need for developing specialized strategies to integrate retrieval with language generation models, thereby laying the groundwork for future research in this field.

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.

Recently, low-resource dialogue state tracking (DST) has received increasing attention. First obtaining state values then based on values to generate slot types has made great progress in this task. However, obtaining state values is still an under-studied problem. Existing extraction-based approaches cannot capture values that require the understanding of context and are not generalizable either. To address these issues, we propose a novel State VAlue Generation based framework (SVAG), decomposing DST into state value generation and domain slot generation. Specifically, we propose to generate state values and use self-training to further improve state value generation. Moreover, we design an estimator aiming at detecting incomplete generation and incorrect generation for pseudo-labeled data selection during self-training. Experimental results on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset show that our method which has only less than 1 billion parameters achieves state-of-the-art performance under the data ratio settings of 5%, 10%, and 25% when limited to models under 100 billion parameters. Compared to models with more than 100 billion parameters, SVAG still reaches competitive results.

The practical use of text-to-image generation has evolved from simple, monolithic models to complex workflows that combine multiple specialized components. While workflow-based approaches can lead to improved image quality, crafting effective workflows requires significant expertise, owing to the large number of available components, their complex inter-dependence, and their dependence on the generation prompt. Here, we introduce the novel task of prompt-adaptive workflow generation, where the goal is to automatically tailor a workflow to each user prompt. We propose two LLM-based approaches to tackle this task: a tuning-based method that learns from user-preference data, and a training-free method that uses the LLM to select existing flows. Both approaches lead to improved image quality when compared to monolithic models or generic, prompt-independent workflows. Our work shows that prompt-dependent flow prediction offers a new pathway to improving text-to-image generation quality, complementing existing research directions in the field.

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.

Computer vision models suffer from a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting when learning novel concepts from continuously shifting training data. Typical solutions for this continual learning problem require extensive rehearsal of previously seen data, which increases memory costs and may violate data privacy. Recently, the emergence of large-scale pre-trained vision transformer models has enabled prompting approaches as an alternative to data-rehearsal. These approaches rely on a key-query mechanism to generate prompts and have been found to be highly resistant to catastrophic forgetting in the well-established rehearsal-free continual learning setting. However, the key mechanism of these methods is not trained end-to-end with the task sequence. Our experiments show that this leads to a reduction in their plasticity, hence sacrificing new task accuracy, and inability to benefit from expanded parameter capacity. We instead propose to learn a set of prompt components which are assembled with input-conditioned weights to produce input-conditioned prompts, resulting in a novel attention-based end-to-end key-query scheme. Our experiments show that we outperform the current SOTA method DualPrompt on established benchmarks by as much as 4.5% in average final accuracy. We also outperform the state of art by as much as 4.4% accuracy on a continual learning benchmark which contains both class-incremental and domain-incremental task shifts, corresponding to many practical settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/GT-RIPL/CODA-Prompt

Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancement is heavily dependent on access to large-scale, high-quality training data. However, in specialized domains such as healthcare, data acquisition faces significant constraints due to privacy regulations, ethical considerations, and limited availability. While synthetic data generation offers a promising solution, conventional approaches typically require substantial real data for training generative models. The emergence of large-scale prompt-based models presents new opportunities for synthetic data generation without direct access to protected data. However, crafting effective prompts for domain-specific data generation remains challenging, and manual prompt engineering proves insufficient for achieving output with sufficient precision and authenticity. We review recent developments in automatic prompt optimization, following PRISMA guidelines. We analyze six peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2024 that focus on automatic data-free prompt optimization methods. Our analysis reveals three approaches: feedback-driven, error-based, and control-theoretic. Although all approaches demonstrate promising capabilities in prompt refinement and adaptation, our findings suggest the need for an integrated framework that combines complementary optimization techniques to enhance synthetic data generation while minimizing manual intervention. We propose future research directions toward developing robust, iterative prompt optimization frameworks capable of improving the quality of synthetic data. This advancement can be particularly crucial for sensitive fields and in specialized domains where data access is restricted, potentially transforming how we approach synthetic data generation for AI development.

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 .

In spite of recent advancements in text-to-image generation, limitations persist in handling complex and imaginative prompts due to the restricted diversity and complexity of training data. This work explores how diffusion models can generate images from prompts requiring artistic creativity or specialized knowledge. We introduce the Realistic-Fantasy Benchmark (RFBench), a novel evaluation framework blending realistic and fantastical scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose the Realistic-Fantasy Network (RFNet), a training-free approach integrating diffusion models with LLMs. Extensive human evaluations and GPT-based compositional assessments demonstrate our approach's superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Our code and dataset is available at https://leo81005.github.io/Reality-and-Fantasy/.

Despite the significant progress of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, they often produce factual errors due to their limited internal knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which enhances LLMs with external knowledge sources, offers a promising solution. However, these methods can be misled by irrelevant paragraphs in retrieved documents. Due to the inherent uncertainty in LLM generation, inputting the entire document may introduce off-topic information, causing the model to deviate from the central topic and affecting the relevance of the generated content. To address these issues, we propose the Retrieve-Plan-Generation (RPG) framework. RPG generates plan tokens to guide subsequent generation in the plan stage. In the answer stage, the model selects relevant fine-grained paragraphs based on the plan and uses them for further answer generation. This plan-answer process is repeated iteratively until completion, enhancing generation relevance by focusing on specific topics. To implement this framework efficiently, we utilize a simple but effective multi-task prompt-tuning method, enabling the existing LLMs to handle both planning and answering. We comprehensively compare RPG with baselines across 5 knowledge-intensive generation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Code generation problems differ from common natural language problems - they require matching the exact syntax of the target language, identifying happy paths and edge cases, paying attention to numerous small details in the problem spec, and addressing other code-specific issues and requirements. Hence, many of the optimizations and tricks that have been successful in natural language generation may not be effective for code tasks. In this work, we propose a new approach to code generation by LLMs, which we call AlphaCodium - a test-based, multi-stage, code-oriented iterative flow, that improves the performances of LLMs on code problems. We tested AlphaCodium on a challenging code generation dataset called CodeContests, which includes competitive programming problems from platforms such as Codeforces. The proposed flow consistently and significantly improves results. On the validation set, for example, GPT-4 accuracy (pass@5) increased from 19% with a single well-designed direct prompt to 44% with the AlphaCodium flow. Many of the principles and best practices acquired in this work, we believe, are broadly applicable to general code generation tasks. Full implementation is available at: https://github.com/Codium-ai/AlphaCodium

Large language models (LLMs) typically generate identical or similar responses for all users given the same prompt, posing serious safety risks in high-stakes applications where user vulnerabilities differ widely. Existing safety evaluations primarily rely on context-independent metrics - such as factuality, bias, or toxicity - overlooking the fact that the same response may carry divergent risks depending on the user's background or condition. We introduce personalized safety to fill this gap and present PENGUIN - a benchmark comprising 14,000 scenarios across seven sensitive domains with both context-rich and context-free variants. Evaluating six leading LLMs, we demonstrate that personalized user information significantly improves safety scores by 43.2%, confirming the effectiveness of personalization in safety alignment. However, not all context attributes contribute equally to safety enhancement. To address this, we develop RAISE - a training-free, two-stage agent framework that strategically acquires user-specific background. RAISE improves safety scores by up to 31.6% over six vanilla LLMs, while maintaining a low interaction cost of just 2.7 user queries on average. Our findings highlight the importance of selective information gathering in safety-critical domains and offer a practical solution for personalizing LLM responses without model retraining. This work establishes a foundation for safety research that adapts to individual user contexts rather than assuming a universal harm standard.

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have made remarkable progress in generating images from text prompts, but their output quality and safety still depend heavily on how prompts are phrased. Existing safety methods typically refine prompts using large language models (LLMs), but they overlook the images produced, which can result in unsafe outputs or unnecessary changes to already safe prompts. To address this, we propose an iterative prompt refinement algorithm that uses Vision Language Models (VLMs) to analyze both the input prompts and the generated images. By leveraging visual feedback, our method refines prompts more effectively, improving safety while maintaining user intent and reliability comparable to existing LLM-based approaches. Additionally, we introduce a new dataset labeled with both textual and visual safety signals using off-the-shelf multi-modal LLM, enabling supervised fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach produces safer outputs without compromising alignment with user intent, offering a practical solution for generating safer T2I content. Our code is available at https://github.com/ku-dmlab/IPR. \textcolor{redWARNING: This paper contains examples of harmful or inappropriate images generated by models.

In this paper, we present VideoGen, a text-to-video generation approach, which can generate a high-definition video with high frame fidelity and strong temporal consistency using reference-guided latent diffusion. We leverage an off-the-shelf text-to-image generation model, e.g., Stable Diffusion, to generate an image with high content quality from the text prompt, as a reference image to guide video generation. Then, we introduce an efficient cascaded latent diffusion module conditioned on both the reference image and the text prompt, for generating latent video representations, followed by a flow-based temporal upsampling step to improve the temporal resolution. Finally, we map latent video representations into a high-definition video through an enhanced video decoder. During training, we use the first frame of a ground-truth video as the reference image for training the cascaded latent diffusion module. The main characterises of our approach include: the reference image generated by the text-to-image model improves the visual fidelity; using it as the condition makes the diffusion model focus more on learning the video dynamics; and the video decoder is trained over unlabeled video data, thus benefiting from high-quality easily-available videos. VideoGen sets a new state-of-the-art in text-to-video generation in terms of both qualitative and quantitative evaluation.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-quality images given a text prompt. However, ensuring the prompt-image alignment remains a considerable challenge, i.e., generating images that faithfully align with the prompt's semantics. Recent works attempt to improve the faithfulness by optimizing the latent code, which potentially could cause the latent code to go out-of-distribution and thus produce unrealistic images. In this paper, we propose FRAP, a simple, yet effective approach based on adaptively adjusting the per-token prompt weights to improve prompt-image alignment and authenticity of the generated images. We design an online algorithm to adaptively update each token's weight coefficient, which is achieved by minimizing a unified objective function that encourages object presence and the binding of object-modifier pairs. Through extensive evaluations, we show FRAP generates images with significantly higher prompt-image alignment to prompts from complex datasets, while having a lower average latency compared to recent latent code optimization methods, e.g., 4 seconds faster than D&B on the COCO-Subject dataset. Furthermore, through visual comparisons and evaluation on the CLIP-IQA-Real metric, we show that FRAP not only improves prompt-image alignment but also generates more authentic images with realistic appearances. We also explore combining FRAP with prompt rewriting LLM to recover their degraded prompt-image alignment, where we observe improvements in both prompt-image alignment and image quality.

Recent neural retrieval mainly focuses on ranking short texts and is challenged with long documents. Existing work mainly evaluates either ranking passages or whole documents. However, there are many cases where the users want to find a relevant passage within a long document from a huge corpus, e.g. legal cases, research papers, etc. In this scenario, the passage often provides little document context and thus challenges the current approaches to finding the correct document and returning accurate results. To fill this gap, we propose and name this task Document-Aware Passage Retrieval (DAPR) and build a benchmark including multiple datasets from various domains, covering both DAPR and whole-document retrieval. In experiments, we extend the state-of-the-art neural passage retrievers with document-level context via different approaches including prepending document summary, pooling over passage representations, and hybrid retrieval with BM25. The hybrid-retrieval systems, the overall best, can only improve on the DAPR tasks marginally while significantly improving on the document-retrieval tasks. This motivates further research in developing better retrieval systems for the new task. The code and the data are available at https://github.com/kwang2049/dapr