arXiv AI

From Search to Signal: Online Post-Training in Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

Where Should RL Post-Training Compute Go? Model Size, Search, Learning, and Feedback

arXiv:2607. 13389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training is increasingly used to adapt foundation models for reasoning, planning, and feedback-driven robot-learning pipelines, but constrained post-training resources are often summarized by a single total FLOP budget.

By Patrick Wilhelm, Odej Kao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Automatic Harness Evolution for Hardware Design Verification: Can LLMs Consolidate Gains Across Discovered Harnesses?

The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can automatically improve the harnesses used for hardware design verification. By evolving harnesses around a fixed subject model on 12 proprietary root‑cause localization tasks, the researchers found that automatically evolved harnesses increased completed attempts by 71‑76% and task coverage by 80‑100%, though overall correct attempts improved only 18‑24%. Despite these gains, the evolved harnesses did not consistently consolidate into a single dominant solution across tasks and metrics, and a separate cross‑benchmark case showed that a repair harness could yield a 35.6% increase in functional passes over a baseline.

By Kidus Seyoum, Ajay Mittur
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 20002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context.

By Yanxi Chen, Weijie Shi, Yuexiang Xie, Boyi Hu, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Knowing When Not to Reuse: Conditional Experience Transfer in Autonomous LLM Post-Training

The paper introduces Boundary‑Calibrated Intervention Transfer (BCIT), a method for conditional experience transfer in autonomous large language model (LLM) post‑training. BCIT links each past update to its specific parent model, data, and training stage, checks whether those conditions still hold, vetoes updates with hard conflicts, and, when necessary, runs a bounded training trial to confirm applicability before adopting the update. Experiments on a 4B model across finance reasoning, text‑to‑SQL, and function calling show that BCIT reduces harmful updates and achieves higher final‑model quality under equal computational budgets compared to other approaches.

By Tingyun Li, Wenfeng Feng, Weiqing Li, Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Guohua Liu, Yuewei Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Aspire: Can Models Self-Evolve from Vague Goals?

The paper introduces ASPIRE, a benchmark that challenges language model agents to self‑evolve from vague, natural‑language goals without explicit evaluation metrics. In ASPIRE, agents must interpret the goal, select data and update strategies, and decide when to evaluate, all while the downstream tasks remain hidden. Experiments show that while agents can complete training loops, weight‑level improvements are sparse and unstable, and the best evolved harness still falls short of a strong engineered baseline.

By Yuhao Wu, Jingyuan Zhang, Jiajun Shi, Yuxuan Zhang, Xinping Lei, Junting Zhou, Zexuan Wang, Yuchen Wu, Huan Zhou, Duo Wang, Yinzhu Piao, Yongchang Peng, Yunfeng Shi, Jin Chen, Zuo Wang, Jinkai Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Wenxuan Zhang, Shen Yan, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang