Large language models increasingly support scientific and algorithmic discovery through inference-time search over evaluated candidates. Existing adaptive discovery controllers assign credit based only on score progress, even though prompt length, retries, and guidance calls cause search actions to incur different token costs.
The paper introduces AnySearch, a reinforcement‑learning framework that trains a single policy to perform budget‑aware search for large language models under any budget constraint. The training proceeds in two phases: first, the agent learns with explicit budget state injection and structured reasoning prompts under linearly decaying budgets; second, the scaffold is removed and the agent adapts to randomly sampled budgets that match deployment conditions. The reward combines answer accuracy and budget efficiency, with adaptive weighting to emphasize efficiency for high‑accuracy queries and reduce it for low‑accuracy ones. Experiments on seven QA benchmarks demonstrate that AnySearch outperforms baselines across all budget scales, generalizes to unseen constraints, and improves tool productivity without excessive token overhead.
By Xiaowei Sun, Jin Li, Yili Hong, Yikun Fu, Yanghua Xiao
arXiv:2606. 00198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While agents are increasingly spending more resources, today agent cost is mostly measured only after execution.
By Yuxiang Lin, Zihan Wang, Mengyang Liu, Yuxuan Shan, Longju Bai, Junyao Zhang, Xing Jin, Boshan Chen, Jinyan Su, Xingyao Wang, Jiaxin Pei, Manling Li
The paper introduces ExTS, a tree‑search policy designed for budget‑constrained agentic search where evaluation and generation costs are high. ExTS treats expansion as a value‑of‑information decision, combining discriminative reward shaping, a stochastic virtual child, and quality‑conditioned branching to allocate budget more effectively. Experiments on prompt optimization, code generation, molecular structure elucidation, and agentic workflow optimization show ExTS matching or surpassing task‑specific baselines with an average gain of +5.5% using a single configuration, and the authors also present pilot‑run diagnostics to guide adaptation to different problem structures.
By Haoyang Fang, Bernie Wang
arXiv:2608. 05651v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly.
By Sichun Luo, Yi Huang, Guanzhi Deng, Haibo Wang, Haochen Luo, Lei Li, Zefa Hu, Junlan Feng, Qi Liu
arXiv:2607. 23765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance across multiple domains, but using the most capable model for every query is prohibitive at scale.
By Yifei Li, Zihui Gao, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan
Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly. A natural alternative is to combine cheap and strong models under a fixed inference budget.
arXiv:2606. 09961v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) as autonomous agents via reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled frontier models to achieve superhuman performance in long-horizon tasks.
By Yu Han, Kailing Li, Yang Jiao, Yulin Dai, Yuqian Fu, Linhai Zhuo, Tianwen Qian
arXiv:2607. 18235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous discovery systems such as OpenEvolve and TTT-Discover are often used as general-purpose harnesses.
By Akshat Gupta, Jermaine Lei, Alexander Lu, Gopala Anumanchipalli, Leshem Choshen
arXiv:2607. 24647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven autonomous research (AR) systems are becoming increasingly effective across a broad range of tasks.
By Haiqian Yang, Yuan Cao
arXiv:2602. 09574v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tree-search decoding is an effective form of test-time scaling for large language models (LLMs), but real-world deployment often imposes a fixed per-query token budget that varies across settings.
By Sora Miyamoto, Daisuke Oba, Naoaki Okazaki
arXiv:2606. 03736v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Resource-constrained pricing controllers can make fixed-price inference impossible: the controller's resource state may remove the target price neighborhood from the feasible set, even when every realized action has a known positive density.
By Ruicheng Ao, Jiashuo Jiang, David Simchi-Levi