@inproceedings{qi-etal-2026-hipo,
    title = "{HIPO}: A Hierarchical Prompt Optimization Framework with Task Awareness and Fine-Grained Debugging",
    author = "Qi, Lu  and
      Chai, Lei  and
      Yu, Hongrui  and
      Qi, Binhang  and
      Sun, Hailong",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.996/",
    pages = "19928--19947",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks. However, their performance often hinges on carefully designed prompts, whose creation requires substantial human effort. While numerous automatic prompt optimization techniques have been proposed, existing methods typically apply the same prompt across all samples within a dataset, ignoring variation in sample difficulty. To address these limitations, we propose HIPO, a HIerarchical Prompt Optimization framework that shifts the paradigm from dataset-level to sample-level optimization. Our framework first employs a lightweight router model, trained offline, to predict the difficulty of each sample at test time. Based on this prediction, HIPO dynamically selects a prompt from a five-tiered hierarchy, tailoring complexity to sample difficulty. Furthermore, two refinement stages{---}Task Description Prompt Refine and Attribution-Based Prompt Refine{---}enhance generalizability and fine-grained optimization. Extensive experiments on 27 tasks demonstrate that HIPO outperforms all baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 25{\%} more tasks than the strongest baseline. Cost analysis further demonstrates substantial efficiency gains, reducing API calls, token consumption, and overall cost by 1.2{\texttimes} to 80{\texttimes}. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/LuQiCode/HIPO."
}