cs.AIJun 29, 2026

AI Training Manager: Bounded Closed-Loop Control of Adaptive Training Recipes

Authors: Anjali RaoNikhil Kamalkumar Advani

Abstract

We present the AI Training Manager, a bounded LLM-based metacognitive monitoring-and-control layer for machine-learning training. The manager asynchronously observes structured telemetry from an active training run, assesses the current training regime, and selects adaptive interventions through a constrained, deterministically verified action interface. We evaluate the approach on supervised and reinforcement-learning tasks. For supervised learning, we induce a multi-objective overfitting failure in a GPT-2-style model trained on TinyStories. The manager prevents the resulting late-run validation collapse, reducing final validation loss by 54.3% relative to the same stressed recipe. For reinforcement learning, we study robotic reaching under opposing multifactor stress regimes. In a conservative regime, the manager raises final deterministic safe success from 0.413 to 0.705. In an aggressive regime, it raises safe success from 0.121 to 0.764. The same manager instructions and action surface are used in both regimes. These results suggest that bounded LLM reasoning can provide a practical metacognitive control layer over ongoing learning processes.

Explore similar work

Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

Interactive Training 2: Auditable Control Plane for Live Model Training

Experiment trackers show how training is progressing, but changing a live run still usually requires trainer-specific code. We present Interactive Training 2, an open-source control plane for steering training through a shared protocol. Training applications declare which settings and actions they expose, humans and automated controllers submit requests through the same interface, and the training loop validates and applies them at safe control points. A customized Aim workspace combines live metrics and controls with a chronological record of requests and outcomes. We demonstrate the system across five NLP and reinforcement-learning workflows. The released code and traces provide a reusable foundation for auditable human- and agent-guided training.
Wentao Zhang, Xuanhe Pan, Han Zhou +2
Jul 26, 2026cs.AI

Training Language Models to Cooperate with Inference-Time Controllers

Large language model (LLM) performance increasingly depends not only on the base model, but also on the inference-time controller used to organize reasoning. Existing post-training methods, however, typically optimize for a single fixed interaction pattern, despite real deployments relying on diverse controllers such as Chain-of-Thought, self-consistency, debate, planning, and verification pipelines. This creates a training--deployment mismatch and limits transfer to new workflows. We introduce CALM (Controller-Aware Language Models), a post-training framework that explicitly places controllers in the training loop. We formulate controller-aware post-training as multi-task reinforcement learning over controller-induced interaction protocols, where controllers are compositions of reusable local reasoning modules. This structure also induces a module-level decomposition of mixed-controller training under a turn-level GRPO objective, enabling a systematic study of controller and module-aware training strategies. We evaluate CALM on held-out controller compositions and broader controller shifts, showing that controller-aware post-training improves generalization across inference-time workflows beyond single-controller optimization.
Moumita Choudhury, Vanshaj Khattar, Jing Liu +4
Jun 30, 2026cs.CL

AutoTrainess: Teaching Language Models to Improve Language Models Autonomously

Training language models (LMs) remains a highly human-intensive process, even as frontier language model agents become increasingly capable at software engineering and other long-horizon tasks. A central challenge is that autonomous post-training is not just a coding problem: it requires the agent to repeatedly plan iterations, construct benchmark-aligned data, run stable training jobs, evaluate checkpoints, and preserve experiment state across many hours of interaction. We present AutoTrainess, a LM agent that exposes these operations as a repository of agent-computer interfaces for planning, data preparation, training, evaluation, and logging. Rather than leaving the agent to operate in a raw CLI environment with an underspecified action space, AutoTrainess externalizes prior human experience as explicit workflows, rules, and execution constraints that guide the agent toward effective and reliable training behavior. On PostTrainBench, AutoTrainess consistently outperforms CLI-only baselines, achieving 26.94 average score with GPT-5.4 (Codex) versus 23.21 for CLI-only. It also generalizes across models and harnesses, improving DeepSeek-V4-Flash (OpenCode) from 12.13 to 19.58.
Zhaojian Yu, Penghao Yin, Shuzheng Gao +3