@inproceedings{yan-etal-2025-efficient,
title = "Efficient and Accurate Prompt Optimization: the Benefit of Memory in Exemplar-Guided Reflection",
author = "Yan, Cilin and
Wang, Jingyun and
Zhang, Lin and
Zhao, Ruihui and
Wu, Xiaopu and
Xiong, Kai and
Liu, Qingsong and
Kang, Guoliang and
Kang, Yangyang",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.37/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.37",
pages = "753--779",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
abstract = "Automatic prompt engineering aims to enhance the generation quality of large language models (LLMs). Recent works utilize feedbacks generated from erroneous cases to guide the prompt optimization. During inference, they may further retrieve several semantically-related exemplars and concatenate them to the optimized prompts to improve the performance. However, those works only utilize the feedback at the current step, ignoring historical and unseleccted feedbacks which are potentially beneficial. Moreover, the selection of exemplars only considers the general semantic relationship and may not be optimal in terms of task performance and matching with the optimized prompt. In this work, we propose an Exemplar-Guided Reflection with Memory mechanism (ERM) to realize more efficient and accurate prompt optimization. Specifically, we design an exemplar-guided reflection mechanism where the feedback generation is additionally guided by the generated exemplars. We further build two kinds of memory to fully utilize the historical feedback information and support more effective exemplar retrieval. Empirical evaluations show our method surpasses previous state-of-the-arts with less optimization steps, i.e., improving F1 score by 10.1 on LIAR dataset, and reducing half of the optimization steps on ProTeGi."
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<abstract>Automatic prompt engineering aims to enhance the generation quality of large language models (LLMs). Recent works utilize feedbacks generated from erroneous cases to guide the prompt optimization. During inference, they may further retrieve several semantically-related exemplars and concatenate them to the optimized prompts to improve the performance. However, those works only utilize the feedback at the current step, ignoring historical and unseleccted feedbacks which are potentially beneficial. Moreover, the selection of exemplars only considers the general semantic relationship and may not be optimal in terms of task performance and matching with the optimized prompt. In this work, we propose an Exemplar-Guided Reflection with Memory mechanism (ERM) to realize more efficient and accurate prompt optimization. Specifically, we design an exemplar-guided reflection mechanism where the feedback generation is additionally guided by the generated exemplars. We further build two kinds of memory to fully utilize the historical feedback information and support more effective exemplar retrieval. Empirical evaluations show our method surpasses previous state-of-the-arts with less optimization steps, i.e., improving F1 score by 10.1 on LIAR dataset, and reducing half of the optimization steps on ProTeGi.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Efficient and Accurate Prompt Optimization: the Benefit of Memory in Exemplar-Guided Reflection
%A Yan, Cilin
%A Wang, Jingyun
%A Zhang, Lin
%A Zhao, Ruihui
%A Wu, Xiaopu
%A Xiong, Kai
%A Liu, Qingsong
%A Kang, Guoliang
%A Kang, Yangyang
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-251-0
%F yan-etal-2025-efficient
%X Automatic prompt engineering aims to enhance the generation quality of large language models (LLMs). Recent works utilize feedbacks generated from erroneous cases to guide the prompt optimization. During inference, they may further retrieve several semantically-related exemplars and concatenate them to the optimized prompts to improve the performance. However, those works only utilize the feedback at the current step, ignoring historical and unseleccted feedbacks which are potentially beneficial. Moreover, the selection of exemplars only considers the general semantic relationship and may not be optimal in terms of task performance and matching with the optimized prompt. In this work, we propose an Exemplar-Guided Reflection with Memory mechanism (ERM) to realize more efficient and accurate prompt optimization. Specifically, we design an exemplar-guided reflection mechanism where the feedback generation is additionally guided by the generated exemplars. We further build two kinds of memory to fully utilize the historical feedback information and support more effective exemplar retrieval. Empirical evaluations show our method surpasses previous state-of-the-arts with less optimization steps, i.e., improving F1 score by 10.1 on LIAR dataset, and reducing half of the optimization steps on ProTeGi.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.37
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.37/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.37
%P 753-779
Markdown (Informal)
[Efficient and Accurate Prompt Optimization: the Benefit of Memory in Exemplar-Guided Reflection](https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.37/) (Yan et al., ACL 2025)
ACL
- Cilin Yan, Jingyun Wang, Lin Zhang, Ruihui Zhao, Xiaopu Wu, Kai Xiong, Qingsong Liu, Guoliang Kang, and Yangyang Kang. 2025. Efficient and Accurate Prompt Optimization: the Benefit of Memory in Exemplar-Guided Reflection. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 753–779, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.