Learning to Translate from Soft to Hard LLM Prompts
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Learning to Translate from Soft to Hard LLM Prompts
Abstract:Soft prompt tuning is a parameter-efficient method for adapting LLMs to specific tasks, but suffers from a lack of interpretability. Building on recent work on interpreting soft prompts (Ramati et al., 2024), we explore how training a dedicated soft prompt to natural language translation model can yield higher translation quality. In particular, in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons on multiple Datasets of Datasets (DoDs), we demonstrate that our translator produces fluent, accurate verbalizations that outperforms existing training-free methods like InSPEcT. In addition to advancing interpretability, our work suggests a promising downstream application: soft prompts optimized on small, open-source models can be translated into portable text prompts that, when deployed on larger closed-API models, exceed the performance of the original soft prompt and, in some cases, even few-shot learning.
| Comments: | 8 Pages, 11 tables, 4 Figures |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.27642 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.27642v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.27642
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Submission history
From: Pitipat Kongsomjit [view email][v1] Tue, 26 May 2026 20:03:08 UTC (369 KB)
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