arXiv Machine Learning

MOCHA: Multi-Objective Chebyshev Annealing for Agent Skill Optimization

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Naive Prompt Optimization: Rethinking the Need for Complex Prompt Search

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.

By Yuan Chang, Xiaoqi Chen
arXiv AI
Oct 2

SkillLens: Adaptive Multi-Granularity Skill Reuse for Cost-Efficient LLM Agents

SkillLens introduces a hierarchical skill-evolution framework that organizes skills into a four-layer graph of policies, strategies, procedures, and primitives, allowing retrieval at mixed granularity. The system first retrieves semantically relevant skill seeds, expands them via a degree‑corrected random walk, and uses a verifier to decide whether to accept, decompose, rewrite, or skip each visited unit. This approach enables agents to reuse compatible subskills while locally adapting mismatched components, and theoretical analysis shows sublinear cost under sparse mismatch assumptions, with empirical results on MuLocbench and ALFWorld demonstrating consistent improvements over strong baselines.

By Ziyang Yu, Yongliang Miao, Liang Zhao, Bowen Zhu, Hasibul Haque
arXiv AI
Oct 9

A Closer Look at Agentic BBO: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Black-Box Optimization

The paper introduces AgenticBBO-Bench, a cross‑domain benchmark for evaluating large language model agents on black‑box optimization tasks such as synthetic functions, hyperparameter tuning, database tuning, chip design, and molecular design. Experiments show that agentic BBO outperforms direct LLM‑based methods in all five domains and beats the best numerical optimizers in four. The study also analyzes the impact of optimization tools, task semantics, prior knowledge, and the LLM’s role, finding that numerical tools are not consistently helpful, task semantics are broadly useful, and numerical optimizers can capitalize on agent‑generated search trajectories.

By Ming Chen, Rong-Xi Tan, Ke Xue, Yu-Jie Zhou, Taiye Lu, Zhi-Xuan Gao, Peng Xie, Zijun Shen, Chen Lu, Haopu Shang, Chao Qian