Automatic Prompt Engineering for Scalable Prompt Inversion in Text-to-Image Ad Generation

Zixin Ding, Qi Zeng, Boying Gong, Wenlong Deng, Bo Pan, Yuxin Chen


Abstract
While prompt engineering offers effective control over Text-to-Image (T2I) generation, it remains labor-intensive for large-scale production. We present PRISM-DUEL, a black-box framework that formalizes prompt optimization as Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE), motivated by advertising workflows requiring low-latency, diverse variants faithful to a human-designed ads. Since zero-shot LLMs are unreliable judges of image quality, PRISM-DUEL obtains label-free pairwise preferences and rationales from an LLM judge over pairs of generated images, then uses a dueling-bandit optimizer to optimize a prompt for generating controlled variations while matching the reference ad’s visual content. By iteratively steering the prompt distribution towards higher-quality generations and improving posterior calibration, PRISM-DUEL preserves visual similarity and semantic faithfulness while increasing diversity. Experiments on PartiPrompts and DreamBooth across Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, FLUX.1, and Qwen-Image show consistent gains over strong baselines in visual faithfulness and prompt interpretability.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-industry.111
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Yunyao Li, Georg Rehm, Mei Tu
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1605–1626
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-industry.111/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zixin Ding, Qi Zeng, Boying Gong, Wenlong Deng, Bo Pan, and Yuxin Chen. 2026. Automatic Prompt Engineering for Scalable Prompt Inversion in Text-to-Image Ad Generation. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), pages 1605–1626, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Prompt Engineering for Scalable Prompt Inversion in Text-to-Image Ad Generation (Ding et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-industry.111.pdf