In this paper, we present our finding that prepending a Task-Agnostic Prefix Prompt (TAPP)  to the input improves the instruction-following ability of various Large Language Models (LLMs)  during inference.TAPPis different from canonical prompts for LLMs in that it is afixedprompt prepended to the beginning of every input regardless of the target task for zero-shot generalization. We observe that both base LLMs (i.e. not fine-tuned to follow instructions)  and instruction-tuned models benefit fromTAPP, resulting in 34.58% and 12.26% improvement on average, respectively. This implies that the instruction-following ability of LLMs can be improved during inference time with a fixed prompt constructed with simple heuristics.
We hypothesize thatTAPPassists language models to better estimate the output distribution by focusing more on the instruction of the target task during inference. In other words, such ability does not seem to be sufficiently activated in not only base LLMs but also many instruction-fine-tuned LLMs111All experiments are reproducible fromgithub.com/seonghyeonye/TAPP..