arXiv AI By Lunjun Zhang, Ryan Chen, Bradly C. Stadie

Evolutionary System Prompt Learning for Reinforcement Learning in LLMs

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The paper introduces Evolutionary System Prompt Learning (E‑SPL), a method that jointly updates a large language model’s weights via reinforcement learning and its system prompts via self‑reflection. In each RL iteration, E‑SPL samples trajectories under multiple prompts in parallel, using them to both evolve the prompts and improve the model’s weights. Experiments show that E‑SPL boosts success rates across several benchmarks (e.g., from 38.8 % to 45.1 % on AIME → BeyondAIME) and outperforms RL‑only or evolution‑only baselines, indicating that weight and context updates synergistically enhance generalization.

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