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.
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.
Naive Prompt Optimization (NPO) is a lightweight, single‑lineage method that iteratively refines prompts using a teacher model’s rollout feedback. It matches or surpasses the performance of more complex optimizers like GEPA while requiring fewer rollouts, and its advantage grows with stronger teacher models. In interactive games, NPO remains competitive, and prompts optimized by NPO transfer well to other student models within the same family.
arXiv:2609.08572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) achieve strong performance by employing specialized multiple agents, yet their performance d...
arXiv:2606. 05684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central challenge for language agents is utilizing past experience to adapt to dynamic test-time conditions.
arXiv:2602. 13769v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating heuristic design in complex, experiment-driven domains requires more than iterative mutation of solution algorithms.
arXiv:2607. 08983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While autonomous coding agents have significantly advanced automated test generation, they remain fundamentally limited by lazy generation, a phenomenon where agents prematurely terminate tasks and systematically avoid complex programmatic logic, resulting in inadequate code coverage.
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:2603. 18388v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving LLM performance without manual prompt engineering.
arXiv:2607. 20668v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: TextGrad improves language-model systems by revising text from feedback.
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:2606. 04465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: System prompt optimization improves agent behavior without modifying the underlying model, yielding human-readable, model-agnostic instructions.