Large language models (LLMs) excel in open domains but struggle in specialized settings with limited data and evolving knowledge. Existing domain adaptation practices rely heavily on manual trial-and-error processes, incur significant hyperparameter complexity, and are highly sensitive to data and user preferences, all under the high cost of LLM training. Moreover, the interactions and transferability of hyperparameter choices across models/domains remain poorly understood, making adaptation gains uncertain even with substantial effort. To solve these challenges, we present AutoAdapt, a novel end-to-end automated framework for efficient and reliable LLM domain adaptation. AutoAdapt leverages curated knowledge bases from literature and open-source resources to reduce expert intervention. To narrow the search space, we design a novel multi-agent debating system in which proposal and critic agents iteratively interact to align user intent and incorporate data signals and best practices into the planning process. To optimize hyperparameters under tight budgets, we propose AutoRefine, a novel LLM-based surrogate that replaces costly black-box search. Across 10 tasks, AutoAdapt achieves a 25% average relative accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art Automated Machine Learning baselines with minimal overhead.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: AutoAdapt takes as input the user instruction and dataset and delivers the domain adapted LLM based on user constraint
Framework
Key Functionality
Planning
Verification
Efficient Optimization
Effective LLM Adaptation
Training-Free Search
With Retrieval
AutoML-GPT ( Zhang et al., 2023 )
×
×
×
×
✓
×
Prompt2Model ( Viswanathan et al., 2023 )
×
×
×
×
×
✓
HuggingGPT ( Shen et al., 2023 )
✓
×
×
×
✓
✓
CAAFE ( Hollmann et al., 2023 )
×
✓
×
×
×
×
MLCopilot ( Zhang et al., 2024 )
×
×
×
×
✓
×
Table 1: Comparison between AutoAdapt and existing LLM-based frameworks.
Figure 2: Framework Overview: AutoAdapt processes user data and task definitions, integrates best practices, generates an executable training pipeline, and refines an intermediate model to produce a deliverable model for users.
Figure 3: Hierarchical Configuration Determination Using a Domain Adaptation Configuration Graph (ACG)
Figure 4: Success Rate (SR), Normalized Performance Score (NPS), Cumulative Score (CS) comparing AutoAdapt with baseline methods across datasets. Higher score indicates better results. AutoAdapt outperforms SoTA baselines across datasets. Detailed results are in \lx@sectionsign I .
Dataset
AutoAdapt
AutoMLAgent
MLCopilot
HF Defaults
DS-Agent
UC Berkeley MATH
27.8±3.5
26.8±2.4
27.2±2.3
26.2±0.06
30.0±3.7
MedQA
61.27±1.1
58.84±1.3
57.50±1.2
58.13±0.04
59.86±1.0
CaseHold
89.22±0.9
84.72±1.1
82.63±1.0
86.21±0.08
87.28±0.9
PW
67.69±1.3
64.53±1.4
63.71±1.5
65.78±0.02
63.40±1.6
RCA
2.30±0.76
2.23±0.81
2.18±0.77
2.23±0.81
2.25±0.66
ARC
83.79±1.2
77.39±1.1
77.56±1.0
78.24±0.03
77.47±1.4
Table 2: Performance comparison across datasets and methods in the template aware (TA) setting. AutoAdapt is better than the baselines even when model and technique (SFT) is fixed.
Figure 5: (a) Ablation and (b) hyperparameter study varying number of multi-agent debate rounds and AutoRefine trials.
Figure 6: (a) RAG, DPO Results (b) Accuracy (bars) and wall-clock time (lines) by coreset sizes for HPO and AutoRefine.
Figure 7: Top figure shows cost breakdown for MedQA across different agents in the MultiAgent planning phase. Bottom figures show the minimal time/money overhead and performance gains.
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 8: Adaptation Configuration Graph (ACG) for the LLM adaptation pipeline with example parameter values at each parameter node.
Figure 9: Best practices retrieval pipeline from KB.
Figure 10: (Left) Boxplot showing the dispersion index metric for each dataset. We observe a median score around 0.5 , indicating a balance between consistency and diversity in the recommendations. (Right) Boxplot showing relevance scores of the retrieved best practices. We observe consistently high relevance across datasets.
Figure 11: Example hyperparameter range recommended by the multi-agent pipeline. Numeric parameters are expressed as intervals, while categorical parameters include discrete choices.
Table 4: Performance comparison across datasets and methods in the template aware (TA) setting.
Dataset
AutoAdapt
AutoMLAgent
MLCopilot
DS-Agent
UC Berkeley MATH
17.00±3.1
8.60±2.7
0.60±0.1
0.00±0.00
MedQA
63.55±2.1
46.97±1.8
38.10±1.2
74.63±2.1
CaseHold
92.53±1.4
85.90±1.2
3.10±0.8
3.16±0.8
PEM
65.14±2.3
28.03±1.9
0.00±0.00
0.00±0.00
RCA
2.30±0.76
1.44±0.64
1.13±0.53
1.23±0.72
ARC
90.87±2.2
76.71±1.5
28.84±1.2
14.85±0.9
Appendix
Table 5: Performance comparison across datasets and methods in the template free (TF) setting
Dataset
SR ( 1/(1+iterations) )
NPS
AutoAdapt
AutoMLAgent
MLCopilot
DS-Agent
AutoAdapt
AutoMLAgent
MLCopilot
DS-Agent
UC Berkeley MATH
1.00
0.11
0.17
1.00
0.17
0.09
0.01
0.00
MedQA
1.00
0.11
0.14
1.00
0.64
0.47
0.38
0.75
CaseHold
1.00
0.11
0.20
0.25
0.93
0.86
0.03
0.03
PEM
1.00
0.11
0.17
0.25
0.65
0.28
0.00
0.00
RCA
1.00
0.11
0.17
1.00
0.46
0.29
0.23
0.25
Appendix
Table 6: SR and NPS across datasets and baselines
Dataset
AutoAdapt
AutoMLAgent
MLCopilot
DS-Agent
UC Berkeley MATH
0.58
0.10
0.09
0.50
MedQA
0.82
0.29
0.26
0.87
CaseHold
0.96
0.49
0.12
0.14
PEM
0.83
0.20
0.08
0.12
RCA
0.73
0.20
0.20
0.62
ARC
0.95
0.44
0.23
0.24
Appendix
Table 7: Cumulative Score (CS) across datasets and baselines
Baseline
Manual Fixes Across Iterations
MLCopilot
It 1 : Incorrect argument name: evaluation_strategy → eval_strategy . It 2 : Precision changed from fp16 to bf16 . It 3 : Gradient check-pointing error. It 4 : Tokenizer padding added. It 5 : compute_metrics function updated. It 6 : Evaluation metric modified.
AutoML-Agent
It 1 : LoraConfig imported from peft , not trl . It 2 : Model name corrected. It 3 : LoRA-trained model merged and unloaded before saving. It 4 : AutoModelForCausalLM used instead of Seq2SeqLM . It 5 : lora_alpha used instead of alpha . It 6 : SFTTrainer.init() received unexpected argument tokenizer . Removed passing the tokenizer to SFTTrainer. It 7 : PeftModel loading corrected. It 8 : TrainingArgs incorrectly constructed and passed.
DS-Agent
It 1 : Incorrect parameter max_seq_length passed to SFTTrainer. It 2 : Model name incomplete. It 3 : peft_config incorrectly passed directly to SFTConfig instead of loading PEFT model.
Appendix
Table 8: Manual Corrections Required Across Iterations for Each Baseline
Instruction-tuned models are deployed into environments where domains are heterogeneous and evolve, yet adding new domains or data typically requires costly retraining. We present AutoAdapt, a modular framework that incorporates new domains and data via targeted single-adapter training without modifying other adapters. The framework automatically discovers latent domains, uses them to train per-domain Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters independently in parallel and performs parameter-free routing. Across 14 domain-specific benchmarks and GPT-4o pairwise judgements, AutoAdapt achieves parity with a LoRA adapter trained on all domains without requiring full-model retraining. We also find evidence of specialisation effect convergence across independent discovery methods. Overall, training each adapter on its own domain prevents domain interference by construction, thus enabling modular, taxonomy-free domain specialisation without aggregate performance loss or full model retraining.
Automated post-training transforms pre-trained large language models (LLMs) into models capable of handling diverse domains by automatically constructing and optimizing a recipe of coupled decisions over data sources, data processing, cross-domain composition, and training configuration under a limited experimental budget. Existing automation either searches predefined recipe spaces that enable systematic optimization but remain fixed rather than adapting their available choices to the target tasks, or uses open-ended agents that discover task-specific choices but leave them implicit in trial-level edits, limiting their systematic reuse and recombination across trials. To fill this gap, we introduce optimization over a task-adapted recipe space, a novel paradigm that can adapt the recipe space itself to the target tasks while representing its choices explicitly for systematic reuse, recombination, and joint optimization. We instantiate this paradigm with Structured Recipe Optimization (SRO), comprising an LLM-based Recipe-Space Designer that constructs the task-adapted recipe space and a Multi-Domain Recipe Optimizer that uses structured trial evidence to guide LLM candidate construction and multi-objective Bayesian trial selection. Extensive experiments show that SRO achieves the highest average score in all evaluated target-model and agent-LLM combinations. In joint post-training across three capability domains and six benchmarks, SRO reaches 41.1 versus 15.4 for the strongest baseline on Qwen3-1.7B with GPT-5.4, and 53.8 versus 40.8 on Qwen3-4B with DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Our code is available at https://github.com/RuohLiuq/SRO.
Ruohong Liu, Bohan Tang, Lekang Jiang +2
LIGHTSPEED · University of Cambridge · Independent Researcher
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered AI research agents to perform isolated scientific tasks, automating complex, real-world workflows, such as LLM training, remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce TREX, a multi-agent system that automates the entire LLM training life-cycle. By orchestrating collaboration between two core modules-the Researcher and the Executor-the system seamlessly performs requirement analysis, open-domain literature and data research, formulation of training strategies, preparation of data recipes, and model training and evaluation. The multi-round experimental process is modeled as a search tree, enabling the system to efficiently plan exploration paths, reuse historical results, and distill high-level insights from iterative trials. To evaluate the capability of automated LLM training, we construct FT-Bench, a benchmark comprising 10 tasks derived from real-world scenarios, ranging from optimizing fundamental model capabilities to enhancing performance on domain-specific tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the TREX agent consistently optimizes model performance on target tasks.