TRPrompt: Bootstrapping Query-Aware Prompt Optimization from Textual Rewards

Prompt optimization improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) without requiring parameter updates to the target model. Following heuristic-based "Think step by step" approaches, the field has evolved in two main directions: while one group of methods uses textual feedback to elicit improved prompts from general-purpose LLMs in a training-free way, a concurrent line of research relies on numerical rewards to train a special prompt model, tailored for providing optimal prompts to the target model. In this paper, we introduce the Textual Reward Prompt framework (TRPrompt), which unifies these approaches by directly incorporating textual feedback into training of the prompt model. Our framework does not require prior dataset collection and is being iteratively improved with the feedback on the generated prompts. When coupled with the capacity of an LLM to internalize the notion of what a "good" prompt is, the high-resolution signal provided by the textual rewards allows us to train a prompt model yielding state-of-the-art query-specific prompts for the problems from the challenging math datasets GSMHard and MATH.

Symbolic Autoencoding for Self-Supervised Sequence Learning

Traditional language models, adept at next-token prediction in text sequences, often struggle with transduction tasks between distinct symbolic systems, particularly when parallel data is scarce. Addressing this issue, we introduce \textit{symbolic autoencoding} ($\Sigma$AE), a self-supervised framework that harnesses the power of abundant unparallel data alongside limited parallel data. $\Sigma$AE connects two generative models via a discrete bottleneck layer and is optimized end-to-end by minimizing reconstruction loss (simultaneously with supervised loss for the parallel data), such that the sequence generated by the discrete bottleneck can be read out as the transduced input sequence. We also develop gradient-based methods allowing for efficient self-supervised sequence learning despite the discreteness of the bottleneck. Our results demonstrate that $\Sigma$AE significantly enhances performance on transduction tasks, even with minimal parallel data, offering a promising solution for weakly supervised learning scenarios.