MLExpert is a 35B Mixture-of-Experts agentic model designed to autonomously conduct long‑horizon machine learning engineering (MLE) tasks. It uses a post‑training approach that combines hierarchical supervised fine‑tuning with Windowed Interaction RL to learn from intermediate outcomes in complex experimentation workflows. On the MLE‑Bench Lite benchmark, MLExpert raises the average medal rate from 37.9% to 72.7%, matching the performance of larger frontier models and demonstrating transferable optimization capabilities to other benchmarks such as NatureBench Lite.
The paper introduces LM2LM, a method that trains large language models (LLMs) to propose improvements for other LLMs using reinforcement learning (RL). It employs a frozen research world model (RWM) to predict the gains of proposals, providing a cheaper surrogate reward, and periodically validates high‑scoring proposals to keep feedback reliable. Experiments across eight LM development environments show that LM2LM enables a Qwen3.8‑27B model to outperform GPT‑6‑sol on held‑out tasks while reducing data‑generation cost by 33%, and it generalizes to unseen model families.
By Minhua Lin, Zijun Wang, Zewen Liu, Zhaotian Weng, Bing He, Zhan Shi, Benoit Dumoulin, Xiang Zhang, Suhang Wang, Hanqing Lu
The paper introduces iCoder-27B, a 27‑billion‑parameter model for RTL design and GPU kernel optimization that is developed through a recursive AI‑led process with minimal human input. Human experts provide high‑level objectives and reusable research skills, while the agent autonomously selects experiments, diagnoses outcomes, and refines training strategies, coordinating SFT, self‑distillation, and reinforcement learning. iCoder outperforms GPT‑5.5 and Claude‑Opus‑4.8 on several benchmarks, demonstrating the feasibility of building frontier‑competitive models with largely automated development.
By Cheng Yang, Jiayang Lyu, Shangyuan Liu, Guibin Zhang, Jiong Lin, Xinlei Yu, Junchi Yan, Shuicheng Yan, Weinan E, Linfeng Zhang, Linfeng Zhang, Qibing Ren
arXiv:2607. 25090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning engineering (MLE) tasks require long-horizon decision making over iterative solution debugging and refinement, under expensive and feedback-driven environment interactions.
By Rushi Qiang, Changhao Li, Haotian Sun, Yuchen Zhuang, Chao Zhang, Bo Dai
arXiv:2606. 06473v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to long-horizon tasks such as scientific discovery and machine learning engineering (MLE), where sustained self-evolution becomes a key capability.
By Shangheng Du, Xiangchao Yan, Jinxin Shi, Zongsheng Cao, Shiyang Feng, Zichen Liang, Boyuan Sun, Tianshuo Peng, Yifan Zhou, Xin Li, Jie Zhou, Liang He, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai
Agentick is a unified benchmark for sequential decision‑making agents that evaluates RL, LLM, VLM, hybrid, and human agents on 37 procedurally generated tasks across six capability categories, four difficulty levels, and five observation modalities via a single Gymnasium‑compatible interface. It includes a Coding API, oracle reference policies, pre‑built SFT datasets, a composable agent harness, and a live leaderboard. An evaluation of 27 configurations and over 90,000 episodes shows no single approach dominates, with GPT‑5 mini leading overall, PPO excelling in planning and multi‑agent tasks, and the reasoning harness boosting LLM performance by 3‑10×, while ASCII observations outperform natural language.
By Roger Creus Castanyer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Glen Berseth
The paper introduces Humanize MLE Agents (HMA), a workflow that alternates two agents across sessions on a shared workspace, limiting each session to at most k experiments and resetting context between sessions. This approach, modeled as a context‑reset semi‑Markov decision process, outperforms single‑agent baselines, achieving a 78.2% any‑medal rate on 75 Kaggle MLE‑bench tasks—8.0 points higher than the best open‑source baseline and using only a quarter of its time budget. Across six heterogeneous agent pairs, HMA improves the any‑medal rate by an average of 6.4 points, and a supplementary kernel‑optimization case reaches 878 cycles, within 1.6% of the community leaderboard leader.
By Changye Li, Zijian Zhang, Muheng Li, Yiduo Pang, Tingjun Wu, Menghan Li, Yitong Liu, Hongkai Guo, Mengchi Chen, Chenyu He, Kaisheng Ma, Wei Xu, Song Han, Sihao Liu, Ligeng Zhu
arXiv:2610.18572v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Automated post-training transforms pre-trained large language models (LLMs) into models capable of handling diverse domains by automatically constructi...
By Ruohong Liu, Bohan Tang, Lekang Jiang, Jack Umenberger, Yiwen Guo
arXiv:2603. 17216v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the advent of AI agents, automated scientific discovery is becoming an increasingly plausible goal.
By Ziyang Cai, Amir Saeidi, Harkirat Behl
This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation.
arXiv:2605. 08756v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automatic heuristic design (AHD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems (COPs).
By Haoze Lv, Ning Lu, Ziang Zhou, Yew-Soon Ong, Shengcai Liu
NeoHorse-1 is a family of agent-native models that pursue recursive self‑improvement through agentic post‑training. The system uses a heterogeneous model pool with intelligent routing to record capability demands, service tiers, and interactions, converting these records into training examples that preserve reasoning, tool calls, and harness context. By structuring supervised fine‑tuning into a three‑stage curriculum and employing routing‑guided on‑policy distillation, NeoHorse-1 closes an evaluation‑selection‑update loop, raising macro‑average performance from 58.94 to 64.87 on 4B models and from 65.60 to 69.04 on 9B models across eleven benchmarks, while also producing a prefill‑only variant that outputs structured decisions and probabilities for agent workflows.
By NeoHorse Team, Guoliang Cao, Guohao Dai, Tianyu Guo, Kai Han, Hailin Hu, Zihan Jiang, Xiang Kuang, Boxun Li, Yulong Li, Zehua Pei, Yuchuan Tian, Jiamin Wang, Yu Wang, Yunhe Wang, Yihong Wu, Haiyang Xu, Shuo Zhang, Hang Zhou, Siyang Cheng, Jiayu Fan, Wei He, Qingrui Jiao, Hongguang Li, Zhiyuan Li, Runke Liu, Xi Liu, Xinchen Liu, Sinno Jialin Pan, Yi Ren, Liuyang Song, Chenyu Wang, Bei Yu, Quanlu Zhang, Xiangyu Zhang, Mengyu Zheng, Yingjie Zong