Aditya Venkatesh's Personal Website

Continuing from the last post, here are some more prompt engineering techniques.

Tree of Thought

Rather than being a way to enhance a prompt, Tree of Thought is more so a prompting framework. You break down your task into intermediate steps and repeat a step multiple times. If a step seems like it is in the right direction, or at least possibly is in the right direction, we continue with that as a new base, and move onto the next step, once again generating multiple responses. This allows for continuously validated reasoning.

Prompt chaining

Prompt chaining is simply breaking a task down into steps and prompting the generative model with those one by one. For example, if you wanted to make a presentation:

Prompt 1: “I want to make a presentation on XYZ. I’d like to cover these points: … . Please create an outline for a 10-slide presentation.”

Prompt 2: “This outline looks good. Give me a good title for my presentation.”

Prompt 3: “Now plan out an effective introduction for a general audience.”

And so on.

Self-consistency

A single LLM response may be incorrect due to various factors – hallucinating details, miscalculations, etc. To improve on this, self-consistency is a prompt engineering technique that essentially produces multiple independent responses to a question, often using randomization techniques to encourage diverse reasoning.

Then, a majority vote is used to obtain the final answer.