Recent systems for optimizing prompts, programs, and ML workflows typically rely on explicit outer-loop controllers such as evolutionary search, bandits, or textual-gradient methods. We ask a fundamentally different question: how much of this search policy can be internalized by a single tool-using agent?
arXiv:2608. 06714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent systems for optimizing prompts, programs, and ML workflows typically rely on explicit outer-loop controllers such as evolutionary search, bandits, or textual-gradient methods.
arXiv:2606. 07603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet most LLM-based agents are statically deployed and unable to improve through task interactions.
Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search.
arXiv:2607. 29241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing modern recommender models still depends heavily on engineers manually iterating over architectural, objective, and training-strategy changes.
arXiv:2609.01045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities as powerful components in agentic systems, enabling sophisticated reasoning and...
arXiv:2607. 15524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Under model--harness co-evolution, harnesses are not merely inference-time scaffolds but data-generating components whose execution traces can shape future foundation models.
OR-Agent is a multi‑agent research framework that automates heuristic design for optimization problems by structuring heuristic search as a tree‑based workflow with explicit hypothesis generation and systematic backtracking. It introduces a hierarchical, optimization‑inspired reflection system that uses short‑term reflections as verbal gradients, long‑term reflections as verbal momentum, and memory compression as semantic weight decay to guide research dynamics. Experiments on classical combinatorial optimization tasks and simulation‑based cooperative driving scenarios show that OR‑Agent outperforms strong evolutionary search baselines, with all code and data publicly available.
arXiv:2602. 13769v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating heuristic design in complex, experiment-driven domains requires more than iterative mutation of solution algorithms.
The paper introduces Agentic Reasoning for Tree Search (ARTS), a method that uses a reasoning language model to navigate the hypothesis‑experiment space in scientific discovery. Unlike traditional approaches that conflate hypothesis quality with execution quality and prune search logs, ARTS evaluates prior execution logs to distinguish implementation failures from poor hypotheses and selects the next hypothesis to pursue. By employing test‑time training to embed search‑tree knowledge into model weights, ARTS achieves a 15.3% relative improvement over leading algorithms on 22 benchmark tasks and enables smaller models like Qwen3‑4B to match or exceed the performance of larger closed‑source models at lower inference cost.
The paper introduces Strategy Accumulation and Guided Execution (SAGE), a two-stage framework that makes automated fine-tuning of large language models cumulative. In the first stage, a multi-agent pipeline uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore training strategies while a Distillation Agent records task-specific insights and cross-task confidence scores into a structured repository. In the second stage, SAGE retrieves relevant experience from this repository to guide training on new tasks, achieving a 12.4‑percentage‑point improvement over a baseline pipeline without accumulated experience on nine unseen tasks.
arXiv:2609.38445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier LLMs are increasingly used to automate scientific research through iterative search. We distinguish idea-driven search from solution-driven se...
arXiv:2606. 07412v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-driven software engineering agents have become a central testbed for real-world language-model capability, yet their training remains limited by the availability of high-quality SWE tasks.