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arXiv · 2608.11219

From Monolithic to Modular: Segment-level Automatic Prompt Optimization

Nikita Kulin·Viktor Zhuravlev·Artur Khairullin·Sergey Muravyov·Ilya Makarov·Daniil Sukhorukov·Ekaterina Averkova
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Abstract

Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) often rewrites prompts monolithically, which can improve one behavior while degrading others. We present SAPO, a segment-level APO method that decomposes prompts into role, context, tasks, and output format, then applies targeted improvements based on top-5 and bottom-5 examples. The optimization loop uses one LLM with static meta-prompts and structured outputs for segmentation, weakness analysis, and candidate generation. We describe a train/validation protocol and a two-stage generation process: (1) segment-level diagnosis and recommendation extraction, (2) candidate synthesis constrained by weak/strong segment signals. Using the evaluation setup across SQuADv2, TweetEval, XSUM, CommonGen, and GSM8K on GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o-mini, SAPO achieves the best average score against Zero-shot and strong APO baselines including APE, OPRO, EvoPrompt, GEPA, and StraGO.

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Nikita Kulin, Viktor Zhuravlev, Artur Khairullin, Sergey Muravyov, Ilya Makarov, Daniil Sukhorukov, Ekaterina Averkova. 2026-07-21. From Monolithic to Modular: Segment-level Automatic Prompt Optimization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11219

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