PROMPT-SAW: Leveraging Relation-Aware Graphs for Textual Prompt Compression
Muhammad Asif Ali, Zhengping Li, Shu Yang, Keyuan Cheng, Yang Cao, Tianhao Huang, Lijie Hu, Lu Yu, Di Wang
Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional abilities for multiple different natural language processing tasks. While prompting is a crucial tool for LLM inference, we observe that there is a significant cost associated with exceedingly lengthy prompts. Existing attempts to compress lengthy prompts lead to sub-standard results in terms of readability and interpretability of the compressed prompt, with a detrimental impact on prompt utility. To address this, we propose PROMPT-SAW: Prompt compresSion via Relation AWare graphs, an effective strategy for prompt compression over task-agnostic and task-aware prompts. PROMPT-SAW uses the prompt's textual information to build a graph, later extracts key information elements in the graph to come up with the compressed prompt. We also propose GSM8K-AUG, i.e., an extended version of the existing GSM8k benchmark for task-agnostic prompts in order to provide a comprehensive evaluation platform. Experimental evaluation using benchmark datasets shows that prompts compressed by PROMPT-SAW are not only better in terms of readability, but they also outperform the best-performing baseline models by up to 14.3 and 13.7 respectively for task-aware and task-agnostic settings while compressing the original prompt text by 33.0 and 56.7.