Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2026

Abstract

Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where “prompt” plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: (1) temporal lag of training data, and (2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the “Prompting Framework” (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with LLMs. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at https://github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.

Keywords

Large language models, prompting

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Areas of Excellence

Digital transformation

Publication

ACM Computing Surveys

Volume

58

Issue

10

First Page

1

Last Page

38

ISSN

0360-0300

Identifier

10.1145/3789253

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3789253

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