arXiv:2601.14525cs.CLcs.AI2026-01被引 13

让AI研究自动执行并反馈,用实验证明能高效找到更优算法。

Towards Execution-Grounded Automated AI Research

  • 构建自动执行系统,在GPU上并行验证大模型想法。
  • 进化搜索10轮就超越基线:后训练提升至69.4%,预训练提速至19.7分钟。
  • 发现大模型想法易早饱和,强化学习易陷入简单解,需改进反馈机制。

自动化AI研究有望加速科学发现,但当前大模型常生成看似合理实则无效的想法。为探究自动化执行是否可行及大模型能否从执行反馈中学习,我们构建了自动化执行器,实现想法并大规模并行启动GPU实验。将两个真实研究问题——大模型预训练与后训练——转化为执行环境,证明该系统可实现前沿大模型采样出的大部分想法。分析两种反馈学习方法:进化搜索和强化学习。执行引导的进化搜索样本高效:在后训练中找到的方法性能显著优于GRPO基线(69.4% vs 48.0%),在预训练中找到的方案比nanoGPT基线快19.7分钟(原为35.9分钟),均仅用十轮搜索。前沿大模型在搜索中常生成有意义算法,但易过早饱和,偶现缩放趋势。强化学习虽提升平均奖励,却因模型收敛于简单方案导致上限未提升,出现模式崩溃。通过深入分析已执行想法与训练动态,为未来执行导向的自动化AI研究提供基础。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Automated AI research holds great potential to accelerate scientific discovery. However, current LLMs often generate plausible-looking but ineffective ideas. Execution grounding may help, but it is unclear whether automated execution is feasible and whether LLMs can learn from the execution feedback. To investigate these, we first build an automated executor to implement ideas and launch large-scale parallel GPU experiments to verify their effectiveness. We then convert two realistic research problems - LLM pre-training and post-training - into execution environments and demonstrate that our automated executor can implement a large fraction of the ideas sampled from frontier LLMs. We analyze two methods to learn from the execution feedback: evolutionary search and reinforcement learning. Execution-guided evolutionary search is sample-efficient: it finds a method that significantly outperforms the GRPO baseline (69.4% vs 48.0%) on post-training, and finds a pre-training recipe that outperforms the nanoGPT baseline (19.7 minutes vs 35.9 minutes) on pre-training, all within just ten search epochs. Frontier LLMs often generate meaningful algorithmic ideas during search, but they tend to saturate early and only occasionally exhibit scaling trends. Reinforcement learning from execution reward, on the other hand, suffers from mode collapse. It successfully improves the average reward of the ideator model but not the upper-bound, due to models converging on simple ideas. We thoroughly analyze the executed ideas and training dynamics to facilitate future efforts towards execution-grounded automated AI research.

自动化研究大模型执行反馈进化搜索

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