Evolution Fine-Tuning:跨371个优化任务学习发现
阅读原文· arxiv.orgEvolution Fine‑Tuning(EFT)是一种中间训练范式,将进化搜索轨迹转为监督信号,使大语言模型学会跨任务迭代改进解决方案。研究构建了包含15.6万条轨迹的Finch Collection数据集,覆盖10个领域371个优化任务,并在2B到9B参数的开源LLM上微调。在22个保留任务上,EFT模型平均超越基线10.22%;结合测试时强化学习,在两个圆填充任务上达到当前最优,并在Erdős最小重叠问题上超越基线。EFT相当于通用发现代理的“练习阶段”,避免从零开始解决新问题。
Would experience designing faster GPU kernels also help close in on a long-standing open mathematical conjecture? Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated into evolutionary search have recently produced state-of-the-art solutions on optimization tasks, including open mathematical conjectures, GPU kernel design, scientific law discovery, and combinatorial puzzles. To achieve this, prior work applied search scaffolds to one target task at a time, so every new problem is approached from scratch and the experience accumulated during search is discarded once the model finishes its attempt. This leaves the capability of iteratively evolving a solution (e.g., knowing which part to mutate and how, deciding when to backtrack) entirely in the scaffold rather than in the model itself. Whether the model itself could acquire this capability and reuse it across different tasks has been largely unexamined. To address this, we introduce Evolution Fine-Tuning (EFT), a mid-training paradigm that teaches LLMs to evolve solutions across tasks by converting evolutionary search trajectories into supervision. We construct Finch Collection, a 156K-trajectory dataset spanning 10 domains and 371 optimization tasks, and fine-tune open-source LLMs from 2B to 9B parameters. Empirically, EFT confers cross-task generalization: across 22 held-out tasks, our models surpass their base counterparts by 10.22% on average. Furthermore, when paired with test-time RL, our model matches state-of-the-art performance on two circle-packing tasks and outperforms its base-model counterpart on the Erdős minimum-overlap problem. EFT thus serves as a "practice phase" for general-purpose discovery agents that do not solve new problems from scratch.