Brief Intro to Prompt Eng

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Setting Params

• deterministic / randomness params: the bigger the value, the less deterministic ( higher randomness)
  • temperature
  • top_p
• max length, stop sequences
• penalty: Frequency and Presence

Elements of a Prompt

Instruction - a specific task or instruction you want the model to perform

Context - external information or additional context that can steer the model to better responses

Input Data - the input or question that we are interested to find a response for

Output Indicator - the type or format of the output.

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??Costar framework?

• C - Context: Provide background information to help LLMs precisely understand the specific scenario, ensuring relevant feedback.
• O - Objective: Clearly define the task to enable LLMs to focus responses on achieving that specific goal.
• S - Style: Specify the desired writing style, such as a notable figure or industry expert (e.g., business analyst or CEO), guiding LLMs to respond with suitable tone and vocabulary.
• T - Tone: Set the emotional tenor to align LLM responses with the intended emotional context, including formal, humorous, empathetic, and more.
• A - Audience: Identify the target audience to tailor LLM responses, ensuring content suitability and understandability for experts, beginners, children, etc.
• R - Response: Specify the output format (e.g., lists, JSON data, professional reports) to match specific needs, facilitating downstream tasks. JSON is ideal for applications requiring programmatic processing.

System Instructions ( hight level instruction)

• Define the operation boundary: Clarify what is not allowed
• Define Task
• Guide LLM how to format its result.

System instructions act as project briefs for language models, ensuring focused and consistent responses. An usage example is the project instructions for Claude.ai

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General Tips

• Include details in your query to get more relevant answers ( be specific and clear)
• Ask the model to adopt a persona ( I prefer to set persona in the objective part)
• Use delimiters to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input ( structure input and output)
• Specify the steps required to complete a task ( simplifying and break task into simpler tasks, chain of thought)
• Provide examples ( few shot)
• Specify the desired length of the output

References:

• six strategies for better prompts
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