无需标注奖励,用树搜索自动优化提示词
UPA: Unsupervised Prompt Agent via Tree-Based Search and Selection
- 构建动态树结构,通过大模型局部对比导航提示空间
- 两阶段框架分离探索与选择,提升搜索稳定性
- 适合无标签数据的提示优化场景,效果优于现有方法
提示代理近期成为自动化提示优化的有前景范式,将提示发现建模为在结构化提示空间中的序列决策问题。尽管该框架可使用先进规划算法,但这些方法通常依赖监督奖励信号,而实际中常不可得。本文提出无监督提示代理UPA,实现在无真实奖励的情况下进行结构化搜索与选择。具体而言,UPA在搜索过程中迭代构建动态树结构,以大语言模型生成的细粒度、位置无关的成对比较为引导。由于局部比较不具全局一致性,我们解耦系统性探索与最终选择,提出基于Bradley-Terry-Luce(BTL)模型的两阶段框架:首先路径级贝叶斯聚合局部比较以过滤不确定候选,再通过全局锦标赛式比较推断提示质量并识别最优提示。多任务实验表明,UPA持续优于现有提示优化方法,证明代理式优化在无监督设置下依然高效。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Prompt agents have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for automated prompt optimization, framing prompt discovery as a sequential decision-making problem over a structured prompt space. While this formulation enables the use of advanced planning algorithms, these methods typically assume access to supervised reward signals, which are often unavailable in practical scenarios. In this work, we propose UPA, an Unsupervised Prompt Agent that realizes structured search and selection without relying on ground-truth (GT) rewards. Specifically, during search, UPA iteratively constructs an evolving tree structure to navigate the prompt space, guided by fine-grained and position-debiased pairwise comparisons from Large Language Models (LLMs). Crucially, as these local comparisons do not inherently yield a consistent global scale, we decouple systematic prompt exploration from final selection, introducing a two-stage framework grounded in the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model. This framework first performs path-wise Bayesian aggregation of local comparisons to filter candidates under uncertainty, followed by global tournament-style comparisons to infer latent prompt quality and identify the optimal prompt. Experiments across multiple tasks demonstrate that UPA consistently outperforms existing prompt optimization methods, showing that agent-style optimization can remain highly effective even in unsupervised settings.
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