{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/plum-prompt-learning-using-metaheuristic","title":"Plum: Prompt Learning using Metaheuristic","arxiv_id":"2311.08364","date":"2023-11-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Rui Pan","Shuo Xing","Shizhe Diao","Wenhe Sun","Xiang Liu","Kashun Shum","Renjie Pi","Jipeng Zhang","Tong Zhang"],"abstract":"Since the emergence of large language models, prompt learning has become a popular method for optimizing and customizing these models. Special prompts, such as Chain-of-Thought, have even revealed previously unknown reasoning capabilities within these models. However, the progress of discovering effective prompts has been slow, driving a desire for general prompt optimization methods. Unfortunately, few existing prompt learning methods satisfy the criteria of being truly \"general\", i.e., automatic, discrete, black-box, gradient-free, and interpretable all at once. In this paper, we introduce metaheuristics, a branch of discrete non-convex optimization methods with over 100 options, as a promising approach to prompt learning. Within our paradigm, we test six typical methods: hill climbing, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms with/without crossover, tabu search, and harmony search, demonstrating their effectiveness in white-box and black-box prompt learning. Furthermore, we show that these methods can be used to discover more human-understandable prompts that were previously unknown in both reasoning and image generation tasks, opening the door to a cornucopia of possibilities in prompt optimization. We release all the codes in \\url{https://github.com/research4pan/Plum}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08364v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.08364v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"plum-prompt-learning-using-metaheuristic","repo_url":"https://github.com/research4pan/plum","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-generation","task_name":"Image Generation"},{"task_slug":"prompt-learning","task_name":"Prompt Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2311.08364","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}