Large Language Models as Optimizers
Authors: name: Chengrun Yang; name: Xuezhi Wang; name: Yifeng Lu; name: Hanxiao Liu; name: Quoc V. Le; name: Denny Zhou; name: Xinyun Chen
Published: 2023-09-07 00:07:15

Abstract: Optimization is ubiquitous. While derivative-based algorithms have been
powerful tools for various problems, the absence of gradient imposes challenges
on many real-world applications. In this work, we propose Optimization by
PROmpting (OPRO), a simple and effective approach to leverage large language
models (LLMs) as optimizers, where the optimization task is described in
natural language. In each optimization step, the LLM generates new solutions
from the prompt that contains previously generated solutions with their values,
then the new solutions are evaluated and added to the prompt for the next
optimization step. We first showcase OPRO on linear regression and traveling
salesman problems, then move on to prompt optimization where the goal is to
find instructions that maximize the task accuracy. With a variety of LLMs, we
demonstrate that the best prompts optimized by OPRO outperform human-designed
prompts by up to 8% on GSM8K, and by up to 50% on Big-Bench Hard tasks.