protologue

Promptbreeder

Promptbreeder is an evolutionary prompt-optimization method in which a population of task prompts is mutated and selected by fitness on training examples, while the mutation prompts that generate the changes are themselves evolved.

Description

Because the instructions for how to mutate prompts also improve over time, the method is described as self-referential. It discovered domain-specific prompts that outperformed hand-written chain-of-thought prompts on arithmetic and commonsense benchmarks, at the cost of many model calls.

Sources

  1. Fernando et al. (2023). Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution.

Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Promptbreeder. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0153). https://protologue.com/t/promptbreeder/

BibTeX
@misc{protologue_promptbreeder,
  title = {Promptbreeder},
  author = {{Protologue}},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.4.0},
  note = {Entry PTL-0153},
  url = {https://protologue.com/t/promptbreeder/}
}

Markdown JSON