GRL-Prompt: Towards Knowledge Graph based Prompt Optimization via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive success in a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks due to their extensive general knowledge of the world. Recent works discovered that the performance of LLMs is heavily dependent on the input prompt. However, prompt engineering is usually done manually in a trial-and-error fashion, which can be labor-intensive and challenging in order to find the optimal prompts. To address these problems and unleash the utmost potential of LLMs, we propose a novel LLMs-agnostic framework for prompt optimization, namely GRL-Prompt, which aims to automatically construct optimal prompts via reinforcement learning (RL) in an end-to-end manner. To provide structured action/state representation for optimizing prompts, we construct a knowledge graph (KG) that better encodes the correlation between the user query and candidate in-context examples. Furthermore, a policy network is formulated to generate the optimal action by selecting a set of in-context examples in a rewardable order to construct the prompt. Additionally, the embedding-based reward shaping is utilized to stabilize the RL training process. The experimental results show that GRL-Prompt outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average increase of 0.10 in ROUGE-1, 0.07 in ROUGE-2, 0.07 in ROUGE-L, and 0.05 in BLEU.