ESPO: Error-Structured Prompt Optimization via Diagnose, Diversify, and Stabilize

arXiv:2609.04197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evolutionary prompt optimizers such as GEPA suffer from prompt bloat: each iteration appends rules and caveats, producing prompts up to 3$\times$ longer yet no more accurate.

We trace this to three deficiencies - incomplete error observation, limited search diversity, and unreliable selection - and propose ESPO (Error-Structured Prompt Optimization), which decomposes prompt optimization into three phases: Diagnose clusters all training errors into structural patterns in one round; Propose generates candidates via four complementary strategies with independent biases; Select applies bootstrap stability selection.

On seven public NLP benchmarks - Tweet, MMLU, GSM8K, HotpotQA, ScoNe, HoVer, and PUPA - ESPO improves average accuracy by $+$3.76 pp over the state-of-the-art (74.67% vs 70.91% for GEPA), matching or exceeding GEPA on every dataset while producing prompts 47% shorter (1,004 vs 1,878 chars) and faster at inference.

Cross-model experiments across four additional student models (Gemma 3 12B, Mistral 14B, Qwen3 32B, Claude Haiku 4.5) show ESPO yields the best average accuracy on every model tested, with the largest gap on Qwen3 GSM8K (15.00% $\to$ 91.40%).

A generalization bound (Appendix) grounds each phase in a corresponding term of the test-time gap, and the ablation confirms a key prediction: adding diversity without bootstrap selection actually hurts performance ($-$1.20%).