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EMNLP Findings2024

Self-Renewal Prompt Optimizing with Implicit Reasoning

Zihan Liang, Ben Chen, Zhuoran Ran, Zihan Wang, Huangyu Dai, Yufei Ma, Dehong Gao, Xiaoyan Cai, Libin Yang

Abstract

The effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies on their capacity to understand instructions and generate human-like responses. However, aligning LLMs with complex human preferences remains a significant challenge due to the potential misinterpretation of user prompts. Current methods for aligning LLM behaviors fall into two categories: output optimization (such as RLHF, RLAIF, and DPO) and input optimization (like OPRO and BPO). While both approaches aim to guide LLMs towards generating responses that align with desired objectives, the laborintensive and intentions-inconsistent data annotation, as well as the strict and tedious training supervision, make them struggle to yield optimal results across all models. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a novel selfrenewal approach called Prompt Optimization with Implicit Reasoning (POIR). It consists of two key components: 1) a model-specific and self-recirculating data collection method that leverages self-evaluation to enhance prompts in accordance with the model's intrinsic logits, and 2) a prompt rewrite schema that injects implicit reasoning for direct preference learning. Through self-renewal optimization, POIR refines LLM outputs to better align with human preferences across various LLMs and tasks, without relying on supervised fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on a range of LLMs and tasks demonstrate POIR's superior performance. We believe this advancement offers a novel paradigm for developing LLMs that are more attuned to user intentions.

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Cited by top-tier papers1

  1. Fine-Grained Activation Steering: Steering Less, Achieving MoreZijian Feng, Tianjiao Li, Zixiao Zhu, Hanzhang Zhou et al.ICLR 2026 · 6 citations

Builds on15

  1. Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersTom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 64,255 citations
  2. Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
  3. Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward ModelRafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Christopher D. Manning et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 10,924 citations
  4. Measuring Massive Multitask Language UnderstandingDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou et al.ICLR 2021 · 7,905 citations
  5. Large Language Models as OptimizersChengrun Yang, Xuezhi Wang, Yifeng Lu, Hanxiao Liu et al.ICLR 2024 · 817 citations

Related papers

  1. Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization Enables Tuning-free Self-Alignment of Language ModelsSomanshu Singla, Zhen Wang, Tianyang Liu, Abdullah Ashfaq et al.EMNLP 2024 · 1 citation
  2. Enabling Lanuguage Models to Implicitly Learn Self-ImprovementZiqi Wang, Le Hou, Tianjian Lu, Yuexin Wu et al.ICLR 2024 · 2 citations
  3. IPO: Your Language Model is Secretly a Preference ClassifierShivank Garg, Ayush Singh, Shweta Singh, Paras ChopraACL 2025
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  5. Black-Box Prompt Optimization: Aligning Large Language Models without Model TrainingJiale Cheng, Xiao Liu, Kehan Zheng, Pei Ke et al.ACL 2024 · 17 citations
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