# Directional Stimulus Prompting

> Directional stimulus prompting trains a small policy model to generate instance-specific hints, such as keywords, that are added to the prompt to steer a large frozen model toward desired outputs.

- Identifier: PTL-0079
- Category: Prompt Optimization
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/directional-stimulus-prompting/
- Introduced: 2023

## Description

The policy model can be trained with supervised learning and reinforcement learning, without access to the large model's weights.

## Related terms

- [Prompt Tuning](https://protologue.com/t/prompt-tuning/)
- [Optimization by Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/opro/)

## Sources

- Li et al. (2023). Guiding Large Language Models via Directional Stimulus Prompting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11520

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Directional Stimulus Prompting. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0079). https://protologue.com/t/directional-stimulus-prompting/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)