# From Instruction to Output: The Role of Prompting in Modern NLG

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11179/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [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)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11324/) (2023)
- [LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05579/) (2024)
- [True Few-Shot Learning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11447/) (2021)
- [Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14739/) (2023)
- [Evaluation of Text Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14799/) (2020)
- [Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07702/) (2023)
- [Large Language Model Guided Tree-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08291/) (2023)
- [Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09902/) (2017)
- [Retrieving and Reading: A Comprehensive Survey on Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00774/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Evaluation Metrics Used for NLG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12009/) (2020)
- [NeuroLogic Decoding: (Un)supervised Neural Text Generation with Predicate Logic Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12884/) (2020)
- [ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12405/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11760/) (2023)
- [Black-Box Prompt Optimization: Aligning Large Language Models without Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04155/) (2023)
- [The Butterfly Effect of Altering Prompts: How Small Changes and Jailbreaks Affect Large Language Model Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03729/) (2024)
- [Thread of Thought Unraveling Chaotic Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08734/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Search Is What You Need For Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14140/) (2022)
- [POSIX: A Prompt Sensitivity Index For Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02185/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prompt engineering has emerged as an integral technique for extending the strengths and abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to gain significant performance gains in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This approach, which requires instructions to be composed in natural language to bring out the knowledge from LLMs in a structured way, has driven breakthroughs in various NLP tasks. Yet there is still no structured framework or coherent understanding of the varied prompt engineering methods and techniques, particularly in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG). This survey aims to help fill that gap by outlining recent developments in prompt engineering, and their effect on different NLG tasks. It reviews recent advances in prompting methods and their impact on NLG tasks, presenting prompt design as an input-level control mechanism that complements fine-tuning and decoding approaches. The paper introduces a taxonomy of prompting paradigms, a decision framework for prompt selection based on varying factors for the practitioners, outlines emerging trends and challenges, and proposes a framework that links design, optimization, and evaluation to support more controllable and generalizable NLG.