Prompt Engineering a Prompt Engineer

Code for paper "Prompt Engineering a Prompt Engineer" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05661), to appear at ACL 2024 (Findings). In the paper,

• We investigate what makes a good meta-prompt in LLM-powered automatic prompt engineering.
• We develop PE2, a strong automatic prompt engineer featuring three meta-prompt components.
• We show that PE2 can (1) make targeted and highly specific prompt edits; (2) induce multi-step plans for complex tasks; (3) reason and adapt in non-standard situations.

Environment

conda create --name pe2 python=3.11
conda activate pe2
conda install pytorch==2.3.1 torchvision==0.18.1 torchaudio==2.3.1 pytorch-cuda=12.1 -c pytorch -c nvidia
pip install -r requirements.txt

Data

• We uploaded all preprocessed data files in data.
• We included scripts to download and preprocess the data in data/preprocess.

Run

Check out example_scripts to run experiments with PE2:

• Run bbh_boolean_expressions.sh for optimizing the prompt for the task of boolean expressions (from BIG-bench Hard), with gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct as the task model, and gpt-4-turbo as the optimization model.
• Run bbh_boolean_expressions_vllm.sh if you want to use a model supported in vLLM as the task model. We use mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 here as an example.
• You can modify the method variable in the scripts to run baselines such as APE and APO.

Explanations on the arguments

• --trainer, select from "ape", "apo", "pe2". Each prompt optimization method uses slightly different workflows, and they are implemented in different "trainers".
• --meta_prompts_dir, directory pointing to the meta prompts that will be used.
• --resume, the code saves intermediate results to the output_dir. If this flag is used, you can rerun the same script to resume. This is helpful when the program crashes (e.g., due to hitting OpenAI rate limits)
• --task and --subtask, specify the task you would like to run prompt optimization
  • task = math, subtask = gsm8k, multiarith
  • task = ii, see subtask names in data/instruction_induction
  • task = cf, see subtask names in data/counterfactual-evaluation
  • task = bbh, see subtask names in data/bbh
• --task_model, the LLM that performs the task with a prompt.
  • You can use OpenAI instruct models like openai_gpt35_turbo_instruct.
  • You can also use models supported in vLLM. The code currently supports mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2, mosaicml/mpt-7b-instruct, 01-ai/Yi-6B.
  • You can add a new vLLM model by editing code in model/zeroshotcot.py.
• --optim_model, the LLM that performs prompt engineering.
  • Currently the code supports openai_gpt35, openai_gpt4, openai_gpt4_turbo, openai_gpt4o, openai_gpt4o_mini.
  • If OpenAI released a new model, you can add it by editing the get_llm function in trainer/utils.py. We integrated gpt4o and gpt4o-mini in this way and the code worked directly.
• --init_method, choose between "file" or "induction". If "file" is selected, use --init_prompt_file to specify the where the initiailzation prompt is. The code reads the file from the data directory.

Contact Us

If you want to discuss about the paper or the code implementation, please reach out to Qinyuan (qinyuany@usc.edu)!

If you used our code in your study, or find our paper useful, please cite us using the following BibTeX:

BibTeX

@article{ye2023prompt,
  title={Prompt engineering a prompt engineer},
  author={Ye, Qinyuan and Axmed, Maxamed and Pryzant, Reid and Khani, Fereshte},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.05661},
  year={2023}
}