PACE: Improving Prompt with Actor-Critic Editing for Large Language Model

Yihong Dong, Kangcheng Luo, Xue Jiang, Zhi Jin, Ge Li


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable potential across various tasks by conditioning on prompts. However, the quality of different human-written prompts leads to substantial discrepancies in LLMs’ performance, and improving prompts usually necessitates considerable human effort and expertise. To this end, this paper proposes Prompt with Actor-Critic Editing (PACE) for LLMs to enable automatic prompt editing. Drawing inspiration from the actor-critic algorithm in reinforcement learning, PACE leverages LLMs as the dual roles of actors and critics, conceptualizing prompt as a type of policy. PACE refines prompt, taking into account the feedback from both actors performing prompt and critics criticizing response. This process helps LLMs better align prompt to a specific task, thanks to real responses and thinking from LLMs.We conduct extensive experiments on 24 instruction induction tasks and 21 big-bench tasks. Experimental results indicate that PACE elevates the relative performance of medium/low-quality human-written prompts by up to 98%, which has comparable performance to high-quality human-written prompts. Moreover, PACE also exhibits notable efficacy for prompt generation.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.436
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7304–7323
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.436
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.436
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yihong Dong, Kangcheng Luo, Xue Jiang, Zhi Jin, and Ge Li. 2024. PACE: Improving Prompt with Actor-Critic Editing for Large Language Model. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 7304–7323, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PACE: Improving Prompt with Actor-Critic Editing for Large Language Model (Dong et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.436.pdf