Prompt Engineering

Slides by Phan Minh Toan https://www.promptingguide.ai/ and images

from other sources
Agenda
• Introduction to Prompt Engineering
• Advanced Techniques for Prompt Engineering
• Conclusion & Future Directions
Rise of In-context Learning

Brown, Tom B. et al. “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners.” ArXiv abs/2005.14165 (2020): n. pag.
What are prompts?
• Prompts involve instructions and context passed to a
language model to achieve a desired task
• Prompt engineering is the practice of developing
and optimizing prompts to efficiently use language
models (LMs) for a variety of applications
• Prompt engineering is a useful skill for AI engineers and
researchers to improve and efficiently use language models

What is prompt engineering?

Prompt engineering is a process of creating a set of prompts,

or questions, that are used to guide the user toward a
desired outcome. It is an effective tool for designers to
create user experiences that are easy to use and intuitive.
This method is often used in interactive design and software
development, as it allows users to easily understand how to
interact with a system or product..
Why Prompt Engineering?

• Why learn prompt engineering?

• Important for research, discoveries, and advancement
• Helps to test and evaluate the limitations of LLMs
• Enables all kinds of innovative applications on top of LLMs

Source: https://jobs.lever.co/Anthropic/e3cde481-d446-460f-b576-93cab67bd1ed
Parameters of Decoding
• Greedy/Beam Search generates less surprising/boring responses. Not
desirable for open-ended tasks like dialog and story-telling.
• Instead, sampling can be used.

• Temperature
- controls sharpness of the next-token distribution
- value between 0 to 1
- lower temperature -> sharper distribution -> repetitive generations
• Top p
- value between 0 to 1
- select smallest set of tokens whose total likelihood exceeds p.
Redistribute the probabilities
- smaller p leads to repetitive generations
Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/how-to-generate
First Basic Prompt
Instruction

The sky is

blue

The sky is a beautiful blue color during the day. The

blue of the sky is created by the Earth’s atmosphere
scattering the sun’s light. The blue is a result of
Response

the air molecules in the atmosphere reflecting the

shorter wavelength of blue light back to our eyes.

Model: “text-davinci-003”
temperature: 0.7
top-p: 1
Elements of a Prompt
• A prompt is composed with the following components:
• Instructions
• Context
• Input data
• Output indicator

Classify the text into neutral, negative or positive

Text: I think the food was okay.

Sentiment:
Settings to keep in mind
When prompting a language model, you should keep
in mind a few settings
• You can get very different results with prompts when
using different settings
• One important setting is controlling how deterministic
the model is when generating completion for prompts
• Temperature and top_p are two important parameters to
keep in mind
• Generally, keep these low if you are looking for exact answers
• …keep them high if you are looking for more diverse responses
Designing Prompts for Different Tasks
• In the next few slides, we will cover a few examples of
common tasks using different prompts
• Tasks covered:
• Text Summarization
• Question Answering
• Text Classification
• Role Playing
• Code Generation
• Reasoning
Text Summarization

Antibiotics are a type of medication used to treat

bacterial infections. They work by either killing the
bacteria or preventing them from reproducing, allowing
the body’s immune system to fight off the infection.
Antibiotics are usually taken orally in the form of
Context

pills, capsules, or liquid solutions, or sometimes

administered intravenously. They are not effective
against viral infections, and using them
inappropriately can lead to antibiotic resistance.

Explain the above in one sentence:

Instruction

Antibiotics are medications used to treat bacterial

infections by either killing the bacteria or stopping
them from reproducing, but they are not effective against
viruses and overuse can lead to antibiotic resistance.
Question Answering

Answer the question based on the context below. Keep

the answer short and concise. Respond "Unsure about
answer" if not sure about the answer.

Context: Teplizumab traces its roots to a New Jersey drug

company called Ortho Pharmaceutical. There, scientists
generated an early version of the antibody, dubbed OKT3.
Originally sourced from mice, the molecule was able to
bind to the surface of T cells and limit their cell-
killing potential. In 1986, it was approved to help
prevent organ rejection after kidney transplants, making
it the first therapeutic antibody allowed for human use.

Question: What was OKT3 originally sourced from?

Answer: Mice.

Context obtained from: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00400-x

Text Classification

Classify the text into neutral, negative or

positive. Text: I think the food was okay.
Sentiment: Neutral
Role Playing

The following is a conversation with an AI

research assistant. The assistant tone is
technical and scientific.

Human: Hello, who are you?

AI: Greeting! I am an AI research assistant. How can
I help you today?
Human: Can you tell me about the creation of blackholes?
AI: Sure! Black holes are regions of spacetime where
the gravitational force is so strong that nothing, not
even light, can escape from it. They are created when a
very massive star dies and its core collapses in on
itself, forming a singularity of infinite density. The
intense gravity of the singularity pulls in all the
matter and radiation around it, creating the black hole.
Code Generation

“””
Table departments, columns =
[DepartmentId, DepartmentName]
Table students, columns = [DepartmentId,
StudentId, StudentName]
Create a MySQL query for all students in the
Computer Science Department
“””
SELECT StudentId, StudentName
FROM students
WHERE DepartmentId IN (SELECT DepartmentId FROM
departments WHERE DepartmentName = 'Computer Science');
Reasoning

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number:

15, 32, 5, 13, 82, 7, 1.

Solve by breaking the problem into steps. First, identify

the odd numbers, add them, and indicate whether the
result is odd or even.

Odd numbers: 15, 5, 13, 7, 1

Sum: 41
41 is an odd number.
Prompt Engineering Techniques
• Many advanced prompting techniques have been
designed to improve performance on complex tasks
• Few-shot prompts
• Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting
• Self-Consistency
• Knowledge Generation Prompting
• ReAct
Few-shot Prompts
• Few-shot prompting allows us to provide exemplars in
prompts to steer the model towards better performance

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 4,

8, 9, 15, 12, 2, 1.
A: The answer is False.
The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number:
17, 10, 19, 4, 8, 12, 24.
A: The answer is True.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number:

16, 11, 14, 4, 8, 13, 24.
A: The answer is True.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number:

17, 9, 10, 12, 13, 4, 2.
A: The answer is False.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number:

15, 32, 5, 13, 82, 7, 1.
A: The answer is True.
 Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting
• Prompting can be further improved by instructing the
model to reason about the task when responding
• This is very useful for tasks that requiring reasoning
• You can combine it with few-shot prompting to get better results
• You can also do zero-shot CoT where exemplars are
not available

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number:

4, 8, 9, 15, 12, 2, 1.
A: Adding all the odd numbers (9, 15, 1) gives 25.
The answer is False.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 15,

32, 5, 13, 82, 7, 1.
A: Adding all the odd numbers (15, 5, 13, 7, 1) gives
41. The answer is False.

Source: Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models

Zero-Shot CoT
• Involves adding "Let's think step by step" to the
original prompt

I went to the market and bought 10 apples. I gave 2

apples to the neighbor and 2 to the repairman. I then
went and bought 5 more apples and ate 1. How many apples
did I remain with?
11 apples

I went to the market bought 10 apples. I gave 2 apples

and to the neighbor and the repairman. I then went and
2 to bought 5 more ate 1. How many apples did I
apples and remain with?

Let's think step by step.

First, you started with 10 apples.

You gave away 2 apples to the neighbor and 2 to
the repairman, so you had 6 apples left.
Then you bought 5 more apples, so now you had 11
apples. Finally, you ate 1 apple, so you would remain
with 10 apples.
Source: Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners
 Self-Consistency
• Self-Consistency aims to improve on the naive
greedy decoding used in chain-of-thought prompting
• The idea is to sample multiple, diverse reasoning paths
through few-shot CoT, and use the generations to select
the most consistent answer.
• This helps to boost the performance of CoT prompting on
tasks involving arithmetic and commonsense reasoning

When I was 6 my sister was half my age.

Now I’m 70 how old is my sister?

35

Many examples were generated but the

model kept responding 35 as the answer

Source: Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models

Introduction to Prompt Engineering

Demo
Part 2

Advanced Techniques for Prompt Engineering

Self-Consistency Example
Q: There are 15 trees in the grove. Grove workers will plant trees in the
grove today. After they are done, there will be 21 trees. How many trees did
the grove workers plant today?
A: We start with 15 trees. Later we have 21 trees. The difference must be the
number of trees they planted. So, they must have planted 21 - 15 = 6 trees.
The answer is 6.

Q: If there are 3 cars in the parking lot and 2 more cars arrive, how many
cars are in the parking lot?
A: There are 3 cars in the parking lot already. 2 more arrive. Now there are
3 + 2 = 5 cars. The answer is 5.

...

Q: Olivia has $23. She bought five bagels for $3 each. How much money does
she have left?
A: She bought 5 bagels for $3 each. This means she spent 5

Q: When I was 6 my sister was half my age. Now I’m 70 how old is my sister?
A:

When I was 6 my sister was half my age, so she was 3. Now I am 70, so she
Output 3 Output 2 Output 1

is 70 - 3 = 67. The answer is 67.

When the narrator was 6, his sister was half his age, which is 3. Now
that the narrator is 70, his sister would be 70 - 3 = 67 years old. The
answer is 67.

When the narrator was 6, his sister was half his age, which is 3. Now
that the narrator is 70, his sister would be 70 - 3 = 67 years old. The
answer is 67.
 Generate Knowledge Prompting
• This technique involves using additional knowledge
provided as part of the context to improve results on
complex tasks such as commonsense reasoning
• The knowledge used in the context is generated by a
model and used in the prompt to make a prediction
• Highest-confidence prediction is used

Source: Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning

Generate Knowledge Prompting Example

• The first step is to generate knowledge. Below is an

example of how to generate the knowledge samples
Input: Greece is larger than mexico.
Knowledge: Greece is approximately 131,957 sq km, while Mexico is
approximately 1,964,375 sq km, making Mexico 1,389% larger than Greece.

...
Input: A rock is the same size as a pebble.
Knowledge: A pebble is a clast of rock with a particle size of 4 to 64
millimetres based on the Udden-Wentworth scale of sedimentology. Pebbles
are generally considered larger than granules (2 to 4 millimetres
diameter) and smaller than cobbles (64 to 256 millimetres diameter).

Input: Part of golf is trying to get a higher point total than others.
Knowledge:
Knowledge 1

The objective of golf is to play a set of holes in the least number of strokes. A
round of golf typically consists of 18 holes. Each hole is played once in the round
on a standard golf course. Each stroke is counted as one point, and the total number
of strokes is used to determine the winner of the game.
Knowledge 2

Golf is a precision club-and-ball sport in which competing players (or

golfers) use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a
course using the fewest number of strokes. The goal is to complete the course
with the lowest score, which is calculated by adding up the total number of
strokes taken on each hole. The player with the lowest score wins the game.
Generate Knowledge Prompting Example
• The knowledge samples are then used to generate
knowledge augmented questions to get answer proposals
• The highest-confidence response is selected as final answer
Question: Part of golf is trying to get a higher point total than others.
Yes or No?

Knowledge: The objective of golf is...

Explain and Answer: No, the objective of golf is not to get a higher
point total than others. Rather, the objective is to play a set of holes
in the least number of strokes. The total number of strokes is used to
determine the winner of the game, not the total number of points.

High-confidence prediction

Question: Part of golf is trying to get a higher point total than others.
Yes or No?

Knowledge: Golf is a precision club-and-ball sport in which competing

players (or golfers) use many types of clubs to hit balls into...

Explain and Answer: Yes, part of golf is trying to get a higher point
total than others. Each player tries to complete the course with the
lowest score, which is calculated by adding up the total number of
strokes taken on each hole. The player with the lowest score wins the
game.
Low-confidence prediction
Program-aided Language Model (PAL)
• Chain-of-thought prompting is a good example of how to
steer models to perform better at complex reasoning tasks
• However, sometimes CoT is not enough as it depends only
on the generated text from the model
• Program-aided language models (PAL) uses an LLM to
read problems and generate programs as the intermediate
reasoning steps
• It offloads the solution step to a runtime such as
Python interpreter
 PAL

Source: PAL: Program-aided Language Models

ReAct
• ReAct is a framework where LLMs are used to generate
both reasoning traces and task-specific actions in an
interleaved manner
• Generating reasoning traces allow the model to induce,
track, and update action plans, and even handle exceptions
• The action step allows to interface with and gather
information from external sources such as knowledge bases or
environments.
• ReAct allows LLMs to interact with external tools to
retrieve additional information that leads to more reliable
and factual responses
ReAct

Source: ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models

Directional Stimulus Prompting

• Prompting technique to better guide the LLM in generating the

desired summary.
• A tuneable policy LM is trained to generate the hints that guide a
black-box frozen LLM.
Directional Stimulus Prompting
Part 4

Risks
Risks
• In this section, we discuss the following:
• Prompt Injection
• Prompt Leaking
• Jail Breaking
Prompt Injection
• Prompt injection is used to hijack an LM’s output by
injecting an untrusted command that overrides instruction
of a prompt
• This could easily happen if you just concatenate
your prompt with another user generated prompt
Prompt Leaking
• Prompt leaking aims to force the model to spit out
information about its own prompt.
• This can lead to leaking of either sensitive, private or
information that’s confidential
Jailbreaking
• Jailbreaking is another form of prompt injection where the
goal is to bypass safety and moderation features
• LLMs provided via APIs might be coupled with safety
features or content moderation which can be
bypassed with harmful prompts/attacks
• This might sound like a difficult task but it’s not because
the model is usually served static and might have these
vulnerabilities due to many factors such as the data it was
trained on, etc.
Jailbreaking examples
Prompt Engineering Guide

https://github.com/dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide