arXiv:2605.18869cs.LGcs.AI2026-05

让大模型提示词在效果和成本间自动权衡,高效找到最优解。

MO-CAPO: Multi-Objective Cost-Aware Prompt Optimization

论文配图:MO-CAPO: Multi-Objective Cost-Aware Prompt Optimization
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于预算分配的多目标优化算法,同时提升性能与降低推理成本。
  • 在12项对比中8次优于基准,相同成本下表现更优,且解集多样。
  • 首次引入噪声鲁棒性评估,适合关注性价比的开发者使用。

大语言模型虽在多种任务上表现优异,但对提示设计极为敏感,亟需自动化优化。现有方法多只关注性能,忽视推理成本或延迟;而现有的多目标优化依赖通用的NSGA-II,效率不足。为此,我们提出MO-CAPO,一种联合优化性能与推理成本的新算法,并引入面向部署的成本目标,全面捕捉大模型推理的计算开销。我们在四个任务和三个大模型上评估,对比基于NSGA-II的多目标方法及顶尖单目标优化器。结果表明,MO-CAPO始终生成强健、多样且稳定的帕累托前沿近似解,兼具成本效益。在12项测试中,有8次在噪声R²指标上超越基线,且常以更低预算达到相近甚至更优性能。所发现的解集覆盖了单目标优化忽略的多样化性能-成本权衡,而高绩效候选仍可媲美单目标最优解。此外,我们首次通过噪声R²与近似差距评估多目标实验的泛化性和鲁棒性,实现更真实的方案质量判断。该方法使从业者能从高效生成的多提示集中,按需选择性能与成本间的最佳平衡。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across a wide range of tasks but are highly sensitive to prompt design, motivating the need for automatic prompt optimization. Existing methods predominantly focus on performance alone, ignoring competing objectives such as inference cost or latency. At the same time, existing work on multi-objective prompt optimization relies on off-the-shelf NSGA-II, ignoring optimization efficiency. As a remedy, we introduce MO-CAPO, a novel multi-objective prompt optimization algorithm that jointly optimizes performance and inference cost while leveraging budget allocation for cost-efficient optimization. We further propose a deployment-oriented cost objective that captures the full computational profile of LLM inference. We evaluate our approach across four tasks and three LLMs and compare it to an NSGA-II-based multi-objective method and state-of-the-art single-objective prompt optimizers. Results show that MO-CAPO consistently identifies strong, robust, and diverse Pareto front approximations while maintaining cost-efficiency. It outperforms the NSGA-II baseline on 8 out of 12 cases in terms of the noisy R2 metric and achieves competitive performances often already at a considerably lower budget. The discovered solution sets span diverse performance-cost trade-offs that are omitted by single-objective optimizers, yet the top-performance candidates remain competitive with single-objective solutions. Additionally, we conduct the first evaluation of multi-objective machine learning experiments that considers generalization and robustness through noisy R2 and approximation gap, enabling a more realistic assessment of solution quality. MO-CAPO enables practitioners to select from an efficiently discovered set of multiple prompts offering different trade-offs between performance and cost.

提示优化多目标成本效率大模型

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