PRompt Optimization in Multi-Step Tasks (PROMST): Integrating Human Feedback and Preference Alignment

Prompt optimization aims to find the best prompt to a large language model (LLM) for a given task. LLMs have been successfully used to help find and improve prompt candidates for single-step tasks. However, realistic tasks for agents are multi-step and introduce new challenges: (1) Prompt content is likely to be more extensive and complex, making it more difficult for LLMs to analyze errors, (2) the impact of an individual step is difficult to evaluate, and (3) different people may have varied preferences about task execution. While humans struggle to optimize prompts, they are good at providing feedback about LLM outputs; we therefore introduce a new LLM-driven discrete prompt optimization framework that incorporates human-designed feedback rules about potential errors to automatically offer direct suggestions for improvement. Our framework is stylized as a genetic algorithm in which an LLM generates new candidate prompts from a parent prompt and its associated feedback; we use a learned heuristic function that predicts prompt performance to efficiently sample from these candidates. This approach significantly outperforms both human-engineered prompts and several other prompt optimization methods across eight representative multi-step tasks (an average 27.7% and 28.2% improvement to current best methods on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, respectively). We further show that the score function for tasks can be modified to better align with individual preferences. We believe our work can serve as a benchmark for automatic prompt optimization for LLM-driven multi-step tasks. Datasets and Codes are available at https://github.com/yongchao98/PROMST. Project Page is available at https://yongchao98.github.io/MIT-REALM-PROMST.