# Diverse Prompts: Illuminating the Prompt Space of Large Language Models with MAP-Elites

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14367 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14367/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Illuminating search spaces by mapping elites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.04909/) (2015)
- [Hard Prompts Made Easy: Gradient-Based Discrete Optimization for Prompt Tuning and Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03668/) (2023)
- [AutoPrompt: Eliciting Knowledge from Language Models with Automatically Generated Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15980/) (2020)
- [Robots that can adapt like animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.3501/) (2014)
- [Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01984/) (2018)
- [Grammar Prompting for Domain-Specific Language Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19234/) (2023)
- [Schema-learning and rebinding as mechanisms of in-context learning and emergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01201/) (2023)
- [Deep Curiosity Search: Intra-Life Exploration Can Improve Performance on Challenging Deep Reinforcement Learning Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00553/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PromptHelper: A Prompt Recommender System for Encouraging Creativity in AI Chatbot Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15575/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompt engineering is essential for optimizing large language models (LLMs), yet the link between prompt structures and task performance remains underexplored. This work introduces an evolutionary approach that combines context-free grammar (CFG) with the MAP-Elites algorithm to systematically explore the prompt space. Our method prioritizes quality and diversity, generating high-performing and structurally varied prompts while analyzing their alignment with diverse tasks by varying traits such as the number of examples (shots) and reasoning depth. By systematically mapping the phenotypic space, we reveal how structural variations influence LLM performance, offering actionable insights for task-specific and adaptable prompt design. Evaluated on seven BigBench Lite tasks across multiple LLMs, our results underscore the critical interplay of quality and diversity, advancing the effectiveness and versatility of LLMs.