Visible but Not Avoided: State-Dependent Re-Proposal of Rejected Candidates in Catalog-Based LLM Optimization Loops
LLM optimization loops often show the proposer the candidates it has already tried and rejected, but leave it to the proposer to avoid them. We ask whether avoidance measured in a static probe predicts avoidance in the states an optimizer's own trajectory produces. In catalog-based loops where three open LLMs improve a GUI agent by naming one of 40 edits, a re-proposal is identified exactly by the edit's name. Clean base-state probes underpredict re-proposal in the proposers' own loops (macro-averaged loop-minus-probe rate 0.32 [0.27, 0.37]), and proposals of already evaluated harness-edit pairs consume 28-63% of valid proposer iterations. The two settings reject different edits: a probe'...
| Authors | Jianlin Chen, Wenhui Chen, Chi Man Vong |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 11 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 October 2026 |
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