Prompt optimization is essential for effective utilization of large language models (LLMs) across diverse tasks. While existing optimization methods are effective in optimizing short prompts, they struggle with longer, more complex ones, often risking information loss and being sensitive to small perturbations. To address these challenges, we propose SCULPT (Systematic Tuning of Long Prompts), a framework that treats prompt optimization as a hierarchical tree refinement problem. SCULPT represents prompts as tree structures, enabling targeted modifications while preserving contextual integrity. It employs a Critic-Actor framework that generates reflections and applies actions to refine the prompt. Evaluations demonstrate SCULPT’s effectiveness on long prompts, its robustness to adversarial perturbations, and its ability to generate high-performing prompts even without any initial human-written prompt. Compared to existing state of the art methods, SCULPT consistently improves LLM performance by preserving essential task information while applying structured refinements. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses show that SCULPT produces more stable and interpretable prompt modifications, ensuring better generalization across tasks.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the the capability of large language models (LLMs) by structuring their reasoning processes. However, existing methods face critical limitations: handcrafted demonstrations require extensive human expertise, while trigger phrases are prone to inaccuracies. In this paper, we propose the Zero-shot Uncertainty-based Selection (ZEUS) method, a novel approach that improves CoT prompting by utilizing uncertainty estimates to select effective demonstrations without needing access to model parameters. Unlike traditional methods, ZEUS offers high sensitivity in distinguishing between helpful and ineffective questions, ensuring more precise and reliable selection. Our extensive evaluation shows that ZEUS consistently outperforms existing CoT strategies across four challenging reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating its robustness and scalability.

Cultural harm stems in LLMs whereby these models fail to align with specific cultural norms, resulting in misrepresentations or violations of cultural values. This work addresses the challenges of ensuring cultural sensitivity in LLMs, especially in small-parameter models that often lack the extensive training data needed to capture global cultural nuances. We present two key contributions: (1) A cultural harm test dataset, created to assess model outputs across different cultural contexts through scenarios that expose potential cultural insensitivities, and (2) A culturally aligned preference dataset, aimed at restoring cultural sensitivity through fine-tuning based on feedback from diverse annotators. These datasets facilitate the evaluation and enhancement of LLMs, ensuring their ethical and safe deployment across different cultural landscapes. Our results show that integrating culturally aligned feedback leads to a marked improvement in model behavior, significantly reducing the likelihood of generating culturally insensitive or harmful content.

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is promising, however has been shown to be sub-optimal, with inferior transfer performance across low-resource languages. In this work, we envision languages as domains for improving zero-shot transfer by jointly reducing the feature incongruity between the source and the target language and increasing the generalization capabilities of pre-trained multilingual transformers. We show that our approach, DiTTO, significantly outperforms the standard zero-shot fine-tuning method on multiple datasets across all languages using solely unlabeled instances in the target language. Empirical results show that jointly reducing feature incongruity for multiple target languages is vital for successful cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, our model enables better cross-lingual transfer than standard fine-tuning methods, even in the few-shot setting.

Massively Multilingual Transformer based Language Models have been observed to be surprisingly effective on zero-shot transfer across languages, though the performance varies from language to language depending on the pivot language(s) used for fine-tuning. In this work, we build upon some of the existing techniques for predicting the zero-shot performance on a task, by modeling it as a multi-task learning problem. We jointly train predictive models for different tasks which helps us build more accurate predictors for tasks where we have test data in very few languages to measure the actual performance of the model. Our approach also lends us the ability to perform a much more robust feature selection, and identify a common set of features that influence zero-shot performance across a variety of tasks.

Few-shot transfer often shows substantial gain over zero-shot transfer (CITATION), which is a practically useful trade-off between fully supervised and unsupervised learning approaches for multilingual pretained model-based systems. This paper explores various strategies for selecting data for annotation that can result in a better few-shot transfer. The proposed approaches rely on multiple measures such as data entropy using n-gram language model, predictive entropy, and gradient embedding. We propose a loss embedding method for sequence labeling tasks, which induces diversity and uncertainty sampling similar to gradient embedding. The proposed data selection strategies are evaluated and compared for POS tagging, NER, and NLI tasks for up to 20 languages. Our experiments show that the gradient and loss embedding-based strategies consistently outperform random data selection baselines, with gains varying with the initial performance of the zero-shot transfer. Furthermore, the proposed method shows similar trends in improvement even when the model is fine-tuned using a lower proportion of the original task-specific labeled training data for zero-shot transfer.