πŸ˜ƒ Basics
🧠 Advanced
πŸ”“ Prompt Hacking
πŸ’ͺ Prompt Tuning🟒 Introduction

Introduction

🟒 This article is rated easy
Reading Time: 1 minute
Last updated on March 3, 2025

Sander Schulhoff

Takeaways
  • Have a basic understanding of what Prompt Tuning is

Prompt tuning is a technique for adapting pre-trained language models to downstream tasks without updating the model's core parameters. Instead of fine‑tuning all the weights, prompt tuning learns a small set of tunable parameters, called soft prompts, that are prepended or appended to the input. These soft prompts (continuous embeddings) are optimized via gradient descent so that, when combined with the (frozen) pre-trained model, they guide it to produce task-specific outputs.

By the end of this section, you will have an understanding of how Prompt Tuning works and how soft prompts can be used to enhance the performance and interpretability of your GenAI applications.

🟦 Interpretable Soft Prompts

🟦 Dynamic Prompting

🟦 Gradient-Free Prompt Tuning

🟦 Low-Rank Prompt Tuning (LoPT)

🟦 Multitask Prompt Tuning

🟦 Prefix-Tuning

🟦 Prompt-Tuning with Perturbation-Based Regularizer

🟦 Prompt Tuning with Soft Prompts

Sander Schulhoff

Sander Schulhoff is the Founder of Learn Prompting and an ML Researcher at the University of Maryland. He created the first open-source Prompt Engineering guide, reaching 3M+ people and teaching them to use tools like ChatGPT. Sander also led a team behind Prompt Report, the most comprehensive study of prompting ever done, co-authored with researchers from the University of Maryland, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Princeton, Stanford, and other leading institutions. This 76-page survey analyzed 1,500+ academic papers and covered 200+ prompting techniques.