  Prompt engineering is a technique that involves augmenting a large
pre-trained model with task-specific hints, known as prompts, to adapt the
model to new tasks. Prompts can be created manually as natural language
instructions or generated automatically as either natural language instructions
or vector representations. Prompt engineering enables the ability to perform
predictions based solely on prompts without updating model parameters, and the
easier application of large pre-trained models in real-world tasks. In past
years, Prompt engineering has been well-studied in natural language processing.
Recently, it has also been intensively studied in vision-language modeling.
However, there is currently a lack of a systematic overview of prompt
engineering on pre-trained vision-language models. This paper aims to provide a
comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research in prompt engineering on three
types of vision-language models: multimodal-to-text generation models (e.g.
Flamingo), image-text matching models (e.g. CLIP), and text-to-image generation
models (e.g. Stable Diffusion). For each type of model, a brief model summary,
prompting methods, prompting-based applications, and the corresponding
responsibility and integrity issues are summarized and discussed. Furthermore,
the commonalities and differences between prompting on vision-language models,
language models, and vision models are also discussed. The challenges, future
directions, and research opportunities are summarized to foster future research
on this topic.
