SePO:自演化提示智能体用于系统提示优化
阅读原文· arxiv.orgSePO提出自指设计,单个提示智能体同时优化任务智能体及自身的系统提示,通过开放式演化搜索维护候选提示档案。训练分两阶段:预训练(多任务池演化)与微调(目标任务)。在数学(AIME'25)、抽象推理(ARC-AGI-1)、研究生科学(GPQA)、代码生成(MBPP)和数独五个基准上,SePO一致超越Manual-CoT、TextGrad和MetaSPO,平均准确率较Manual-CoT提升4.49个百分点。预训练习得的提示优化技能可泛化至未见任务。
System prompt optimization improves agent behavior without modifying the underlying model, yielding human-readable, model-agnostic instructions. Existing methods build a prompt agent that refines task agents' system prompts, yet leave the prompt agent's own system prompt hand-engineered and fixed. We propose Self-Evolving Prompt Optimization (SePO), which treats the prompt agent's own system prompt as an optimization target alongside task agents' system prompts. SePO adopts a self-referential design. A single prompt agent improves both task agents' system prompts and its own under an open-ended evolutionary search that maintains an archive of candidate prompts as stepping stones. Training proceeds in two stages: pre-training evolves the prompt agent on a multi-task pool, and fine-tuning then applies it to a target task. Across five benchmarks spanning math (AIME'25), abstract reasoning (ARC-AGI-1), graduate-level science (GPQA), code generation (MBPP), and logic puzzles (Sudoku), SePO consistently outperforms Manual-CoT, TextGrad, and MetaSPO, improving the average accuracy by 4.49 points compared to Manual-CoT. The prompt optimization skill from pre-training also generalizes to tasks beyond the pre-training mixture, rather than memorizing per-task prompts.