mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques

arXiv 2406.06608 ↗First posted 6 Jun 2024cs.CL cs.AIcited by 115

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Cited by 20 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) systems are increasingly being deployed across diverse industries and research domains. Developers and end-users interact with these systems through the use of prompting and prompt engineering. Although prompt engineering is a widely adopted and extensively researched area, it suffers from conflicting terminology and a fragmented ontological understanding of what constitutes an effective prompt due to its relatively recent emergence. We establish a structured understanding of prompt engineering by assembling a taxonomy of prompting techniques and analyzing their applications. We present a detailed vocabulary of 33 vocabulary terms, a taxonomy of 58 LLM prompting techniques, and 40 techniques for other modalities. Additionally, we provide best practices and guidelines for prompt engineering, including advice for prompting state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs such as ChatGPT. We further present a meta-analysis of the entire literature on natural language prefix-prompting. As a culmination of these efforts, this paper presents the most comprehensive survey on prompt engineering to date.

Key facts. Cited by 115 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2024.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 6; 2025: 51; 2026: 58.

115 papers.

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  1. 2024Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researcherscited by 348
  2. 2025Darwin Godel Machine: Open-Ended Evolution of Self-Improving Agentscited by 294
  3. 2026Self-Harness: Harnesses That Improve Themselvescited by 79
  4. 2025Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 53
  5. 2025Policy-as-Prompt: Rethinking Content Moderation in the Age of Large Language Modelscited by 29
  6. 2025AI Agentic Programming: A Survey of Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunitiescited by 26
  7. 2025VISTA: A Test-Time Self-Improving Video Generation Agentcited by 26
  8. 2025LLM-based Agentic Reasoning Frameworks: A Survey from Methods to Scenarioscited by 25
  9. 2025The Rogue Scalpel: Activation Steering Compromises LLM Safetycited by 18
  10. 2025PromptGuard: Soft Prompt-Guided Unsafe Content Moderation for Text-to-Image Modelscited by 16
  11. 2025On the Use of Agentic Coding Manifests: An Empirical Study of Claude Codecited by 14
  12. 2025An Empirical Study of Agent Developer Practices in AI Agent Frameworkscited by 14
38 more
  1. 2025AutoLabs: Cognitive Multi-Agent Systems with Self-Correction for Autonomous Chemical Experimentationcited by 13
  2. 2025The PIMMUR Principles: Ensuring Validity in Collective Behavior of LLM Societiescited by 12
  3. 2025CIRCUIT: A Benchmark for Circuit Interpretation and Reasoning Capabilities of LLMscited by 11
  4. 2025GAAPO: Genetic Algorithmic Applied to Prompt Optimizationcited by 10
  5. 2025VerilogDB: The Largest, Highest-Quality Dataset with a Preprocessing Framework for LLM-based RTL Generationcited by 8
  6. 2026From Brute Force to Semantic Insight: Performance-Guided Data Transformation Design with LLMscited by 7
  7. 2026AtelierEval: Agentic Evaluation of Humans & LLMs as Text-to-Image Prompterscited by 7
  8. 2025Estimating Item Difficulty Using Large Language Models and Tree-Based Machine Learning Algorithmscited by 6
  9. 2025CAPO: Cost-Aware Prompt Optimizationcited by 6
  10. 2025From surveillance to signalling: escalation channels as environmental controls for agentic AIcited by 6
  11. 2026Autonomous Research Agents: A Survey of AI Scientists and the Verification Gapcited by 6
  12. 2024Can Large Language Models Reason about the Region Connection Calculus?cited by 5
  13. 2025Combinatorial Optimization for All: Using LLMs to Aid Non-Experts in Improving Optimization Algorithmscited by 5
  14. 2025The Hidden Structure -- Improving Legal Document Understanding Through Explicit Text Formattingcited by 5
  15. 2026PaperSearchQA: Learning to Search and Reason over Scientific Papers with RLVRcited by 5
  16. 2026When Silence Is Golden: Can LLMs Learn to Abstain in Temporal QA and Beyond?cited by 5
  17. 2026When Does Persona Prompting Actually Help? A Retrieval and Metric Analysis of Expert Role Injection in LLMscited by 4
  18. 2024AT-RAG: An Adaptive RAG Model Enhancing Query Efficiency with Topic Filtering and Iterative Reasoningcited by 3
  19. 2025Improve Rule Retrieval and Reasoning with Self-Induction and Relevance ReEstimatecited by 3
  20. 2025Prompt Engineer: Analyzing Hard and Soft Skill Requirements in the AI Job Marketcited by 3
  21. 2025Are All Prompt Components Value-Neutral? Understanding the Heterogeneous Adversarial Robustness of Dissected Prompt in Large Language Modelscited by 3
  22. 2025Test-Time Reasoners Are Strategic Multiple-Choice Test-Takerscited by 3
  23. 2026The Behavioral Fabric of LLM-Powered GUI Agents: Human Values and Interaction Outcomescited by 3
  24. 2024Learning Personalized Prompts for Healthcare Guidancecited by 2
  25. 2025StreetLens: Enabling Human-Centered AI Agents for Neighborhood Assessment from Street View Imagerycited by 2
  26. 2025Dynamic Context-Aware Prompt Recommendation for Domain-Specific AI Applicationscited by 2
  27. 2025MetaGraph: A Large-Scale Meta-Analysis of GenAI in Financial NLP (2022-2025)cited by 2
  28. 2025A Survey of LLM Prompt Datasets: Taxonomy, Linguistic Patterns, and Practical Usescited by 2
  29. 2025Empathic Prompting: Non-Verbal Context Integration for Multimodal LLM Conversationscited by 2
  30. 2025Pragmatic Theories Enhance Understanding of Implied Meanings in LLMscited by 2
  31. 2026A Guide to Large Language Models in Modeling and Simulation: From Core Techniques to Critical Challengescited by 2
  32. 2026Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Userscited by 2
  33. 2026Baseline Performance of AI Tools in Classifying Cognitive Demand of Mathematical Taskscited by 2
  34. 2026Context-CoT: Enhancing Context Learning via High-Quality Reasoning Synthesiscited by 2
  35. 2024Judgment-of-Thought Prompting: A Courtroom-Inspired Framework for Binary Logical Reasoning with Large Language Modelscited by 1
  36. 2025Multimedia and Visual Analytics in the Agentic Eracited by 1
  37. 2025AI4Math: A Native Spanish Benchmark for University-Level Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 1
  38. 2025Can large language models assist choice modelling? Insights into prompting strategies and current models' capabilitiescited by 1

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