arXiv AI By Ruth Wan Theng Chew, Zhiliang Chen, Apivich Hemachandra, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

BoLT: A Benchmark to Democratize Black-box Optimization Research for Expensive LLM Tasks

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BoLT is a new benchmark designed to make black-box optimization research for large language model (LLM) tasks more accessible. It presents a suite of realistic LLM optimization problems—covering multi‑fidelity, multi‑objective, heteroscedastic noise, and high‑dimensional search spaces—grounded in thousands of real experiments and represented by lightweight surrogate models. The authors evaluate a wide range of Bayesian and other black‑box optimization methods on BoLT, finding that some BO techniques consistently outperform others and revealing gaps in current methods for LLM optimization.

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