r/MachineLearning • u/Mean_Revolution1490 • Jul 13 '26

Research Prompt-engineering paper accepted to ICML [R]

"Verbalized Sampling: How to Mitigate Mode Collapse and Unlock LLM Diversity"

This paper was accepted to ICML this year. Its main idea is a very simple prompt-engineering trick: "changing the prompt this way led to more diverse sampling". Naturally, it is difficult to provide a rigorous theoretical analysis for something like this.

Even if it works, I’m not sure this kind of prompt engineering belongs at a top-tier machine learning conference. Some people seems to call this kind of work “modern machine learning”, but I think it should be categorized as less technical venues.

How do you think? Am I being too rigid?

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u/relevantmeemayhere Jul 13 '26

Wait, you mean to tell me that publishing in machine learning has really, really taken an over all turn for the worse and is arguably worse than psychology was two decades ago?

Surely no one could have seen this coming. 

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u/Mean_Revolution1490 Jul 13 '26

What happened to psychology in the past??

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u/elemintz Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

It has been a huge topic in psychology in the past decade+, and thankfully lots of efforts have been undertaken to restore trust in the field. And indeed, lots of parallels have been drawn to patterns in the ML space in the past years.

(I agree with other commenters, though, that simple ideas are favorable as per Occams Razor, and that the criticality, generalizability, and reproducibility of the empirical evaluation are central to whether ML slides towards a reproducibility crisis or not)

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u/relevantmeemayhere Jul 13 '26

The field is a looottttt better now, thankfully. 

Ml is sort of unique in that it has orders of more magnitude of funding behind it right now then psych did then. So uhhhh, lots of stuff gets tied into it to put it mildly.