Preprint Open access
How Should a Prompt Optimizer Spend a Tight Budget? BudgetAPO with Noise-Adaptive Evaluation
Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has been widely employed to adapt large language models without updating their weights, yielding promising results. However, existing methods such as GEPA and OPRO assume hundreds to thousands of subject-model calls, far more than is practical behind paid, rate-limited APIs. Under ti …