SPLICE: Structured Prompt Local Iterative Combinatorial Evolution

Anish Acharya, P Studans, A Dhanda, N V Rao, V A Khatri, S A Niaki, B Verkhovsky

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026

Treats a production prompt as a set of blocks, some frozen and some editable, and optimizes it with section-local textual gradients and elitist beam search, giving the first formal guarantees for iterative LLM-driven prompt optimization. Outperforms prior prompt optimizers across benchmarks and three model capability tiers while keeping frozen sections verbatim.

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