Enabling large language models (LLMs) to perform tasks in zero-shot has been an appealing goal owing to its labor-saving (i.e., requiring no task-specific annotations); as such, zero-shot prompting approaches also enjoy better task generalizability. To improve LLMs' zero-shot performance, prior work has focused on devising more effective task instructions (e.g., ``let's think step by step'' ). However, we argue that, in order for an LLM to solve them correctly in zero-shot, individual test instances need more carefully designed and customized instructions. To this end, we propose PRoMPTd, an approach that rewrites the task prompt for each individual test input to be more specific, unambiguous, and complete, so as to provide better guidance to the task LLM. We evaluated PRoMPTd on eight datasets covering tasks including arithmetics, logical reasoning, and code generation, using GPT-4 as the task LLM. Notably, \algoname achieves an absolute improvement of around 10\% on the complex MATH dataset and 5\% on the code generation task on HumanEval, outperforming conventional zero-shot methods. In addition, we also showed that the rewritten prompt can provide better interpretability of how the LLM resolves each test instance, which can potentially be leveraged as a defense mechanism against adversarial prompting. The source code and dataset can be obtained from https://github.com/salokr/PRoMPTd

为了提高大型语言模型的零样本性能，我们提出了PRoMPTd方法，通过为每个测试输入重写任务提示来实现更具体、明确和完整的指导，实现了对不同任务的更好解决方案，并提供了更好的解释性以应对对抗性提示。

实例需更加小心：为实例重写提示可提高零-shot性能