REVIEW 5 minor 127 references
Order-of-addition experiments raise LLM success rates on optimal design construction from about 12% to 98%.
Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →
T0 review · grok-4.5
2026-07-11 06:08 UTC pith:D5Y33JCS
load-bearing objection Clean transfer of OofA designs and logistic PWO models to LLM prompt order sensitivity, with large confirmed gains on a concrete design-construction task.
Prompt engineering using order-of-addition experiments: An application to generating two-level fractional factorial designs
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
Order-of-addition designs together with logistic pairwise-ordering models can quantify the effect of reordering prompt elements and can locate high-performing configurations that raise the success rate of state-of-the-art LLMs on constructing optimal two-level fractional factorial designs by tens of percentage points.
What carries the argument
The compound logistic pairwise-ordering (PWO) model: binary pseudo-factors that record whether component i precedes component j, optionally crossed with rephrasing indicators and selected two-factor interactions, linked to binomial success counts via logistic regression.
Load-bearing premise
That a logistic pairwise-ordering model fitted to an 80-run design is accurate enough to rank the remaining untested orderings among the 240 possible prompt configurations.
What would settle it
Run the five highest-ranked predicted sequences and the original base prompt for 60 independent trials each; if the observed success rates fail to match the model predictions within the reported standard errors, or if none of the new sequences substantially outperforms the base prompt, the central claim fails.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes order-of-addition (OofA) experiments as a systematic prompt-engineering method for quantifying and mitigating order dependency in LLMs. Components of a base prompt (ROLE, INSTRUCTION, STEP-BY-STEP, FORMAT, SHOT) and two rephrasings of INSTRUCTION are treated as OofA factors; binomial logistic models (full dummy-variable and pairwise-ordering/PWO, with and without two-factor interactions) are fitted to success rates of constructing minimum-aberration 16-run two-level designs. Three experiments with gpt-4.1 and gemini-2.5-flash (full OF designs for q=3; 80-run COAs for q=5) demonstrate statistically significant ordering and rephrasing effects and identify configurations that raise confirmed success rates from 11.7% to 98.3% (gpt-4.1, 9 factors) and from 35% to 100% (gemini-2.5-flash, 7 factors).
Significance. The work supplies a statistically grounded, cost-efficient alternative to ad-hoc or purely search-based prompt reordering. Strengths include the use of component-orthogonal arrays, overdispersion-corrected logistic PWO models (including a compound interaction extension new to the OofA literature), sequential deviance decompositions, and independent 60-replicate confirmation experiments whose observed rates closely match model predictions. The concrete, large gains on a nontrivial experimental-design task make the method immediately useful to statisticians and engineers who rely on LLMs for design generation, while the modeling framework is portable to other prompt-engineering settings.
minor comments (5)
- Section 2.2 and Tables 4–5: the initial overdispersion estimates (ϕ̂ ≈ 4.3 and 5.0) are high; a brief remark on residual diagnostics or on whether a beta-binomial alternative was considered would strengthen the modeling discussion.
- Section 4.2.2 / Table 5: stepwise BIC selection of the interaction model is pragmatic but opaque; listing the candidate pool size and the final term-selection path (or providing the code path) would aid reproducibility.
- Figure 1 and Table 1: success-rate boxplots and the full OF table are dense; a short textual summary of the dominant ordering patterns per task would improve readability.
- Supplementary Section S4: the brief demonstration that newer models (gpt-5.4, gemini-3-flash-preview) still exhibit order dependency is valuable; a one-sentence pointer in the main-text concluding remarks would help readers locate it.
- Notation: the switch between s_i (dummy variables for full orderings) and z_ij (PWO pseudo-factors) is clear once introduced, but a single sentence reminding the reader of the mapping would reduce cognitive load.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: empirical LLM success rates and held-out confirmation runs stand independently of the fitted PWO models.
full rationale
The paper's derivation chain is empirical and self-contained. Order-of-addition designs (full OF or 80-run COA via Stokes-Xu algorithm) generate fresh prompt configurations that are submitted to gpt-4.1 or gemini-2.5-flash; success rates are measured by independent binomial counts of whether the returned design meets the minimum-aberration criterion. Logistic and compound logistic PWO models (main effects plus BIC-selected interactions) are then fitted to these observed rates solely for screening and ranking; the headline gains (11.67 % o 98.3 % for the 16-run 9-factor task; 35 % o 100 % for the 7-factor task) rest on separate confirmation experiments of 60 new LLM calls on the model-selected sequences (Tables 6 and S7). Those observed rates match the predictions but are not forced by them. No equation equates a claimed prediction to a fitted constant by construction, no uniqueness theorem is imported from overlapping authors, and the base-prompt elements taken from Vazquez et al. (2026) supply only the application setting, not the ordering-effect results. The modeling assumption that a low-order PWO interaction model extrapolates well is therefore non-load-bearing for the strongest claim.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
free parameters (4)
- temperature
- thinkingBudget (gemini)
- number of replicates Nr
- OF design size N=80
axioms (4)
- domain assumption Number of successful design constructions in Nr independent LLM calls follows a binomial distribution with success probability p that depends on prompt ordering and rephrasing.
- domain assumption Pairwise-ordering pseudo-factors z_ij (and selected two-factor interactions) are sufficient to capture the dominant order effects on p.
- domain assumption Component-orthogonal arrays produced by the Stokes–Xu algorithm remain efficient for the logistic PWO model even though the original algorithm targeted continuous responses.
- ad hoc to paper The five chosen prompt elements (ROLE, INSTRUCTION, STEP-BY-STEP, FORMAT, SHOT) and the single rephrasing of INSTRUCTION exhaust the relevant degrees of freedom for the studied tasks.
invented entities (2)
-
compound logistic pairwise-ordering (PWO) model (and its interaction extension)
no independent evidence
-
base Prompt 1 (ROLE + INSTRUCTION + STEP-BY-STEP + FORMAT + SHOT) for two-level fractional factorial generation
no independent evidence
read the original abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming ubiquitous in engineering and science because they can turn prompts into data analysis code, experimental designs, formulations of optimization problems, among other applications. However, many LLMs suffer from a phenomenon called order dependency, in which the order of phrases in the prompt affects their performance on a given task. To overcome this issue, we introduce a systematic method that uses order-of-addition experiments to quantify the ordering effect of elements in a prompt and identify their best positions. We demonstrate our methodology by constructing two-level fractional factorial designs using state-of-the-art LLMs. We show that order-of-addition experiments can elucidate order dependency in these LLMs, and can help us to identify a high-quality prompt configuration for the task.
Figures
Reference graph
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discussion (0)
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