Hierarchical Online Prompt Mutation with Dual-Loop Feedback for Guardrailed Evidence Document Generation: A Production-Evaluation Case Study

Abstract

High-stakes production document-generation systems require language models to be adaptive, evidence-grounded, and auditable. We present HOPM, a hierarchical online prompt mutation framework evaluated on a real marketplace dispute-evidence workflow. HOPM treats prompts as online policies: a family/version router selects a prompt, deterministic guardrails attribute failures to mutable prompt-token categories, and dual feedback from human review and an automated judge updates both routing and mutation priorities. The primary evidence is an observed matched production-evaluation ablation: seven variants are evaluated on the same 600 cases each, enabling component comparisons against static prompting, manual iteration, bandit-only routing, mutation-only adaptation, human-only feedback, auto-judge-only feedback, and full dual-loop HOPM. Full HOPM improves count win rate over a static control from 34.7% to 45.7% (+11.0 pp; paired McNemar p = 1.31e-11) and amount-weighted win rate from 22.3% to 41.4% (+19.1 pp; 95% paired bootstrap CI [10.3, 28.9] pp). It also increases mean Likert quality from 3.18 to 4.40 and reduces issue-flag rate from 15.3% to 5.2%. Supporting review artifacts cover 770 generated-text reviews, 318 labeled reviewer exports, a 10-case/61-rating calibration slice, and a 70-case/350-rating OCR benchmark; these artifacts calibrate rubric, guardrail, title-risk, and OCR-risk interpretation rather than substituting for the production ablation. The paper includes control setup, sample sizes, confidence intervals, paired tests, prompt-token categories, pseudocode, schema, rubric, guardrail taxonomy, and a constructed example so the evaluation structure can be reproduced without exposing proprietary evidence.