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What is a system prompt? 

Research Question

What is a system prompt? 
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Academic Insights

A system prompt is a predefined set of instructions, examples, and knowledge documents used to guide the behavior of a large language model (LLM) across multiple requests, aiming to improve efficiency and maintain consistency in responses.

Key Insights

  • Definition and Purpose:
    • A system prompt is a long, predefined input that specifies the instructions, examples, and knowledge documents for a task, reused across multiple requests to guide the LLM's behavior .
  • Challenges:
    • Long system prompts can cause throughput and latency bottlenecks due to the increased cost of generating the next token as the sequence length grows .
  • Efficiency Improvements:
    • RelayAttention, an attention algorithm, has been proposed to handle system prompts more efficiently by reducing redundant memory accesses, thus improving performance without requiring model retraining .

Conclusion

System prompts are essential for guiding LLMs in a consistent manner across multiple requests, but they can introduce efficiency challenges that need to be addressed through optimized algorithms like RelayAttention.

1

PromptMagician: Interactive Prompt Engineering for Text-to-Image Creation

41 citations | IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics | Yingchaojie Fenget | 2023Cite
2

Wordflow: Social Prompt Engineering for Large Language Models

5 citations | ArXiv | Zijie J. Wanget | 2024Cite
5

Audio Prompt Tuning for Universal Sound Separation

5 citations | ICASSP 2024 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) | Yuzhuo Liuet | 2023Cite
12

Prompt and Secure Data Storage and Recovery System

2021 5th International Conference on Information Systems and Computer Networks (ISCON) | Ambika Guptaet | 2021Cite
16

Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners

2721 citations | ArXiv | Takeshi Kojimaet | 2022Cite

Related Questions

  • How does a system prompt work?
  • What are examples of system prompts?
  • Why are system prompts important?
  • How can system prompts be customized?
  • What is the difference between a system prompt and a user prompt?

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