# A Survey on Prompting Techniques in LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03740 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03740/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08786/) (2021)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03350/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [Universal Adversarial Triggers for Attacking and Analyzing NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07125/) (2019)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [PAL: Program-aided Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10435/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [A Study on Prompt Injection Attack Against LLM-Integrated Mobile Robotic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03515/) (2024)
- [Urban Mobility Assessment Using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00063/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Ability of Large Language Models to Reason about Cardinal Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16528/) (2024)
- [The Prompt Canvas: A Literature-Based Practitioner Guide for Creating Effective Prompts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05127/) (2024)
- [Discrete Diffusion Models for Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07050/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Acquisition on Mass-shooting Events via LLMs for AI-Driven Justice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12545/) (2025)
- [Evaluating the Ability of Large Language Models to Reason about Cardinal Directions, Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12059/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Reliability in LLM-Integrated Robotic Systems: A Unified Approach to Security and Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02163/) (2025)
- [Retcon -- a Prompt-Based Technique for Precise Control of LLMs in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03317/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autoregressive Large Language Models have transformed the landscape of Natural Language Processing. Pre-train and prompt paradigm has replaced the conventional approach of pre-training and fine-tuning for many downstream NLP tasks. This shift has been possible largely due to LLMs and innovative prompting techniques. LLMs have shown great promise for a variety of downstream tasks owing to their vast parameters and huge datasets that they are pre-trained on. However, in order to fully realize their potential, their outputs must be guided towards the desired outcomes. Prompting, in which a specific input or instruction is provided to guide the LLMs toward the intended output, has become a tool for achieving this goal. In this paper, we discuss the various prompting techniques that have been applied to fully harness the power of LLMs. We present a taxonomy of existing literature on prompting techniques and provide a concise survey based on this taxonomy. Further, we identify some open problems in the realm of prompting in autoregressive LLMs which could serve as a direction for future research.