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:2606. 04465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: System prompt optimization improves agent behavior without modifying the underlying model, yielding human-readable, model-agnostic instructions.
Combee is a new framework that scales prompt learning for self‑improving language model agents by enabling many agents to run in parallel while learning from their combined traces. It uses parallel scans, an augmented shuffle mechanism, and a dynamic batch size controller to maintain quality and reduce delay. Experiments on AppWorld, Terminal‑Bench, Formula, and FiNER show up to 17× speedup over prior methods with comparable or better accuracy at similar cost.
arXiv:2608. 10471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompt optimizers automate the search for prompts that improve language-model performance, but existing methods rely on a predefined optimization procedure: the algorithm determines which candidates to explore and how the search progresses, while the language model generates or refines prompt proposals.
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.
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?
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.
The paper investigates why prompt optimization works better for some tasks than others by decomposing reward variance into response variance and system‑prompt variance. It finds that optimization succeeds when system‑prompt variance dominates, and that adding more user prompts can actually reduce this variance, especially on heterogeneous datasets. To address this, the authors propose $p1$, a filtering method that selects a small set of high‑variance user prompts, which improves optimization on reasoning benchmarks and even allows a system prompt trained on just two AIME 24 prompts to generalize well.
arXiv:2605. 29796v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search.
arXiv:2602. 11351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proactive large language model (LLM) agents aim to actively plan, query, and interact over multiple turns, enabling efficient task completion beyond passive instruction following and making them essential for real-world, user-centric applications.
arXiv:2511. 20297v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly capable of complex, multi-step tasks such as GUI automation, tool use, and data manipulation, yet they cannot learn from experience: each new session rediscovers solutions from scratch.
The paper introduces an exploration-guided prompt scaffolding framework for multimodal large language models, dynamically adjusting the prompt distribution during reinforcement learning post-training. It uses an Exploration Potential Score (EPS) derived from KL-regularized policy improvement to assess prompt utility without extra overhead, and a teacher model rewrites low-utility prompts to preserve intent while improving informativeness. Experiments on Geo3K, MMK12, MathVision, and MMMU-Pro show consistent performance gains, up to 9.7% in-domain and over 11% on out-of-distribution benchmarks.
arXiv:2608. 12764v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep search agents operate over trajectories spanning dozens of steps, yet standard reinforcement learning provides only a single outcome reward per trajectory, which is far too sparse for effective credit assignment.