promptolution: A Unified, Modular Framework for Prompt Optimization

Abstract

Prompt optimization has become crucial for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) across a broad range of tasks. Although many research papers demonstrate its effectiveness, practical adoption is hindered because existing implementations are often tied to unmaintained, isolated research codebases or require invasive integration into application frameworks. To address this, we introduce promptolution, a unified, modular open-source framework that provides all components required for prompt optimization within a single extensible system for both practitioners and researchers. It integrates multiple contemporary discrete prompt optimizers, supports systematic and reproducible benchmarking, and returns framework-agnostic prompt strings, enabling seamless integration into existing LLM pipelines while remaining agnostic to the underlying model implementation.