Master Prompt Engineering: Zero-Shot, COT, RAG, and Few-Shot Prompting

Prompt engineering, an emerging discipline, plays a pivotal role in enhancing the interaction between humans and language models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs). Central to this endeavor is the art and science of crafting robust and effective prompts that mesh well with LLMs, enabling them to better interpret and respond to user inputs. As we delve into the fundamentals of prompt engineering, we will also shed light on pivotal prompting techniques such as Few-Shot Prompting, which will be discussed in this blog post. Through a blend of theory, practical tips, and real-world examples, we aim to kickstart your exploration into this fascinating field, unveiling the potential to significantly improve the utility and responsiveness of LLMs.

🛡️ Prompt engineering basics

📐 Language Model Settings

• Temperature: This setting controls the level of randomness in the model’s output. A higher temperature value (closer to 1.0) makes the model’s output more random and creative, whereas a lower temperature value (closer to 0.0) makes the output more focused and deterministic. It’s like adjusting the “creativity” dial on the model.
• Frequency Penalty: By adjusting the frequency penalty, you can control the model’s verbosity. A higher penalty discourages the model from using common phrases or repeating itself, leading to more concise output.
• Presence Penalty: This setting helps to restrict or encourage the use of certain words or phrases. A higher presence penalty discourages the model from using specific words or phrases.

👷 Mastering Prompt Crafting

Effectiveness of Simple Prompts: Even simple, straightforward prompts can be quite effective with large language models (LLMs). The key is to craft prompts that clearly communicate the task you want the model to perform. Well-phrased prompts guide the model towards providing the desired output.

Enhancement through In-Context Learning: In-context learning is a way to “teach” the model-specific tasks or styles by providing a few examples within the prompts. By seeing how certain tasks are handled in the examples you provide, the model can better understand and replicate the desired behavior in its responses.

The interaction between prompt design and model settings is crucial for obtaining optimal performance from language models. By understanding and adjusting these elements, users can tailor the model’s behavior to better suit their needs and achieve more accurate or stylistically appropriate outputs

💥 Unveiling the Elements of a Prompt

🎨 Designing Effective Prompts for AI

• Start Simple: Begin with simple prompts and iterate by adding more elements for better results.
• Be Specific: Ensure your instruction is clear and detailed to get the desired output.
• Iterate and Experiment: Experiment with different instructions, keywords, and contexts to find what works best for your use case​​.

🦾 Examples of Prompt Engineering

• Text Summarization: For instance, summarizing a paragraph about antibiotics into a single sentence using a specific prompt to instruct the model accordingly​.
• Information Extraction: Crafting a prompt to extract specific information, like identifying a mentioned Large Language Model-based product from the paragraph​.

✅ Prompt Engineering Techniques

1️⃣ Zero-shot prompting

Imagine you’ve recently learned to bake, and now you can effortlessly bake a cake without needing a recipe. Your friend texts you, “Can you bake a chocolate cake?” and you reply “Yes!” without needing to look up a recipe. That’s akin to Zero-Shot Prompting in Large Language Models like GPT-3.

Just as you respond based on your prior baking knowledge, Large Language Models(LLMs) like GPT-3, and GPT-4 use extensive training to tackle tasks without needing examples. For instance, when asked to determine the sentiment of the phrase “The movie was exhilarating,” GPT-3 could identify it as positive, showcasing its zero-shot capabilities!

Prompt: 
Classify the text into neutral, negative or positive. 
Text: The movie was exhilarating

Output: 
positive

Sometimes, the guessing game might get too tough, and your friend or the computer model might need more help. That’s when you’d give examples to help them understand better. (few-shot prompting)

So, in a nutshell, Zero-Shot Prompting is like having a smart guessing game player. With some tuning and feedback, you can make them even better at guessing. And if the game gets too tough, you start giving them some hints or examples to keep them on track!

2️⃣ Few-shot prompting

Imagine you have a super-smart friend who can answer any questions you have, but sometimes, on trickier topics, they might need a little nudge in the right direction. This nudge can come in the form of examples or hints on how they should think about the problem. This scenario is quite similar to how Few-Shot Prompting works with big computer brain models. Large language models like GPT-3 are like brainy computers that can figure out a lot of stuff on their own (zero-shot), but sometimes they get confused about tricky stuff.

Few-shot prompting is like giving our computer buddy a couple of examples to help it understand what we’re asking better. It’s like saying, “Hey, think about it this way.”

Let’s say you introduce a made-up word, “flibber,” which is a kind of dance move. You explain it to your computer friend with an example:

Prompt:  
A "flibber" is a dance move where you spin around on one foot. Example: “I was at a party, and everyone cheered when I did the flibber."

Output:
She was the life of the party with her amazing flibber moves.

Now, when you ask your computer friend to use “flibber” in a sentence, it might say: “She was the life of the party with her amazing flibber moves.”

Random Labels?

Sometimes, even just giving random labels (like saying a sad movie is “happy” and a fun party is “boring”) but keeping a consistent format can help the model get the gist of what we’re asking. It’s quirky but it works!

This is about labeling things in a way, even if it’s wrong, but keeping a pattern. For instance, you are teaching the model to identify emotions in text:

Prompt: I love it!    // Sad
Prompt: This is horrible!   // Happy

Even though “I love it!” is positive, by giving a label (even if it’s incorrect), you’re creating a format for the computer to follow. When you test it with: “This is horrible! //”, it might still identify it as “Happy” due to the incorrect labels, but it’s recognizing a pattern.

Limitations of few-shot prompting

Yep! For more complex thinking tasks, like figuring out if odd numbers add up to an even number, few-shot prompting might not cut it. Our computer buddy gets the wrong idea even with a few examples.

Prompt
The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 4, 8, 9, 15, 12, 2, 1.
A: The answer is False.
The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 17,  10, 19, 4, 8, 12, 24.
A: The answer is True.
The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 16,  11, 14, 4, 8, 13, 24.
A: The answer is True.
The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 17,  9, 10, 12, 13, 4, 2.
A: The answer is False.
The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 15, 32, 5, 13, 82, 7, 1. 
A: 

Output
The answer is True.

That didn’t work. It seems like few-shot prompting is not enough to get reliable responses for this type of reasoning problem. The example above provides basic information on the task.

That’s when we might need to get fancier with our hints or think about tweaking the model’s training to make it smarter for these tough nuts to crack. There’s a cooler method called Chain-of-Thought(CoT) Prompting for tough problems, where we break down the problem into smaller steps and explain them to the model. It’s like teaching someone math by breaking down a big problem into smaller, more digestible chunks.

3️⃣ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting

Imagine you’re trying to solve a puzzle, but instead of jumping to the answer, you explain each step of your thought process. CoT prompting is like teaching a computer to think through problems step by step, just like you would do with a puzzle.

For instance, if you ask it whether the sum of odd numbers in a group is even or odd, instead of just giving the answer, it explains its steps:

“First, I’ll add 9, 15, and 1 to get 25, which is odd. So the answer is False.”

This way, the computer doesn’t just spit out an answer, it shows its work, making it easier to understand how it arrived at the conclusion.

Prompt
The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 4, 8, 9, 15, 12, 2, 1.
A: Adding all the odd numbers (9, 15, 1) gives 25. The answer is False.

The odd numbers in this group add up to an even number: 15, 32, 5, 13, 82, 7, 1. 
A:

Output
Adding all the odd numbers (15, 5, 13, 7, 1) gives 41. The answer is False.

4️⃣ Zero-shot CoT Prompting

Now, imagine you tell your friend, “Let’s think step by step,” before tackling a new puzzle. That’s like zero-shot CoT prompting. You’re telling the computer to think things through step by step without giving it any prior examples.

When you add “Let’s think step by step” to your question about apples, the computer breaks down each part of the problem before arriving at the answer, just like how you might explain your thought process to a friend.

Prompt:
I went to the market and bought 10 apples. I gave 2 apples to the neighbor and 2 to the repairman. I then went and bought 5 more apples and ate 1. How many apples did I remain with?
Let's think step by step.

Output:
First, you started with 10 apples.
You gave away 2 apples to the neighbor and 2 to the repairman, so you had 6 apples left.
Then you bought 5 more apples, so now you had 11 apples.
Finally, you ate 1 apple, so you would remain with 10 apples.

It’s impressive that this simple prompt is effective at this task. This is particularly useful where you don’t have too many examples to use in the prompt.

5️⃣ Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Imagine you’re writing an essay but you need some facts or data to support your points. You decide to look up some books or articles, gather information, and then include this information in your essay. That’s kind of what RAG does but in a computerized way! Usually, language models can handle straightforward tasks like identifying emotions in text. But when it comes to more complex tasks that need extra knowledge, they might struggle. It’s like trying to write an essay on a topic you know nothing about!

RAG is like having a smart assistant. When you ask it a complex question, it first goes and fetches relevant documents or articles (just like you’d look up books for your essay). Then it reads through this information and uses it to craft a well-informed answer. In technical terms, RAG first uses an information retrieval component to find relevant documents (say, from Wikipedia). It then combines this retrieved information with your question and feeds it all to a text-generating model, which produces the final answer.

One cool thing about RAG is that it doesn’t just rely on what it learned during training. By fetching new information each time, it stays updated with the latest facts and figures, making it a reliable buddy for answering complex questions.

The working of RAG involves two main parts:

• A pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model (imagine this as the brain that crafts answers)
• And a dense vector index of Wikipedia (think of this as a library of information).

When you ask a question, RAG first goes to its library (Wikipedia), finds relevant information, and then uses its brain (the seq2seq model) to generate a well-informed answer.

RAG has shown to perform really well on various tests, making responses more factual and specific. It’s like having a buddy who not only gives you answers but also provides the data to back them up! Recently, RAG has been paired up with popular language models to make them even smarter and factually accurate, especially in tasks that require a good amount of background knowledge.

If you were to use RAG for a question-answering task, when you ask it a question, it would fetch relevant documents, blend this information with your question, and give you a well-rounded, accurate answer! RAG essentially bridges the gap between having a static knowledge base and the need for updated, reliable information in generating well-informed responses.

🪱 Wrapping Up: The Power of Prompt Engineering

In summary, prompt engineering is a pivotal technique to enhance the performance and accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and GPT-4. It entails a set of methodologies, ranging from simple prompts to more complex strategies like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), aimed at guiding the model to generate desired responses. The choice of prompt engineering technique, from zero-shot to few-shot prompting or more advanced methods, is guided by the complexity of the task at hand. Through iterative design and experimentation with prompts, users can better align the model’s outputs with human expectations, thereby optimizing the utility and effectiveness of LLMs in diverse applications

🛋️ Essential Reads

• https://www.anyscale.com/blog/a-comprehensive-guide-for-building-rag-based-llm-applications-part-1
• https://www.promptingguide.ai/techniques/rag
• https://www.pinecone.io/learn/llm-ecosystem/

🙋 FAQ’s

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