Principled Instructions Are All You Need
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Paper summary
Distills effective LLM prompting into 26 guiding principles and validates them across multiple model families.
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01
26 principles: Covers prompt structure, audience specification, example selection, formatting, role assignment, and stepwise decomposition.
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Broad model validation: Tested on LLaMA-1/2 (7B, 13B, 70B) and GPT-3.5/4, finding the principles generalize across scales and families.
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Both small and large benefits: Smaller models benefit more from structured prompting (higher variance reduction), while larger models benefit in absolute accuracy on harder tasks.
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Practical reference: Functions as a cheat-sheet for practitioners, converting scattered prompting folklore into testable recipes.