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:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-industry.111.pdf