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# How often to perform maintenance operations (merge, prune)
MAINTENANCE_INTERVAL = 40
# Strategy selection thresholds
STRATEGY_CREATION_THRESHOLD = 0.7 # Higher threshold to avoid creating similar strategies
STRATEGY_MERGING_THRESHOLD = 0.6 # Lower threshold to merge more similar strategies
MIN_SUCCESS_RATE_FOR_INFERENCE = 0.4 # Minimum success rate for a strategy to be used during inference
The configs are all defined here - https://github.com/codelion/optillm/blob/main/optillm/plugin...
Here the system seems to have discovered this strategy by itself. The prompts are generic because during learning there is a part to refine and combine them. I haven’t experimented yet by adding all prompts to every query, given the large context it will be interesting to see.
E.g. This was the strategy discovered by optiLLM for solving word problems:
*Refined Strategy for Solving Word Problems:*
1. *Understand:*\n * Read the problem carefully (multiple times).\n * Identify the question (what are you trying to find?).\n * List all given information (facts, numbers, units).\n * Clarify ambiguous terms/units.
2. *Organize Information & Identify Unknowns:*\n * Choose an organization method: (e.g., table, diagram, list, drawing).\n * Clearly identify the unknowns (what you need to solve for).
3. *Plan and Translate:*\n * Define all variables with units (e.g., `p = number of pennies`, `c = number of compartments`).\n * Identify relationships between knowns and unknowns.\n * Convert units if necessary.\n * Write equations or expressions, including units, that relate the knowns and unknowns.\n * Ensure units are consistent throughout the equations.\n * Outline the solution steps.
4. *Solve:*\n * Show work step-by-step.\n * Track units throughout calculations.\n * Calculate accurately.\n * Solve for the unknowns.\
5. *Evaluate and Verify:*\n * Check if the answer is reasonable.\n * Verify the answer.
6. *Summarize:*\n * State the answer with units
Full list of strategies discovered is available here -https://github.com/codelion/optillm/blob/main/optillm/plugin...
The system maintains two separate limits: a storage limit (max 10 strategies per problem type in the database) and an inference limit (max 3 strategies applied per query). This keeps the database manageable while ensuring the system prompt doesn't get too long.
One interesting finding was that strategies only get used for inference once they have at least 5 attempts and a 40% success rate. This prevents the system from applying unproven strategies to new problems.
The approach works particularly well with reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ - the learned strategies seem to guide their thinking process effectively.
I'm especially curious about:
1. How this might work with different model families
2. Whether the community sees value in sharing strategy databases between users
3. Ideas for extending beyond text-based reasoning to multimodal problems
The plugin integrates with our broader optillm project which has other inference optimization techniques. You can combine SPL with methods like mixture-of-agents or MCTS using the "&" operator.
Next I'm thinking about meta-learning - having the system learn how to create better strategies more efficiently. Also exploring collaborative strategy sharing.
Would love to hear thoughts on the approach or if anyone has ideas for other problem domains where this might be useful!
MMLU-PRO is 12,000 instances. To avoid this we set a 600 seconds timeout for each instance to run.
The breakthrough was combining two techniques I'd been working on separately: adaptive classification (which can learn new categories without retraining) and an open source implementation of Pivotal Token Search from Microsoft's Phi-4 paper. When I put them together with dynamic token budgeting, the performance gains were much better than expected.
What surprised me most was that the technique actually uses fewer tokens on average while improving performance. The adaptive allocation means simple queries finish faster, offsetting the extra computation on complex ones.
A few technical notes:
- The steering vectors are small (typically <1MB per pattern) and add minimal memory overhead
- Classification adds about 10ms latency, which is negligible
- Target layer selection matters - I found middle layers (15-20) work best for most models
I'd love feedback on:
- Have you tried similar adaptive approaches with your models?
- What other reasoning patterns would be useful to steer toward?
- Ideas for automatically detecting the optimal target layer?
Thanks for checking it out! Happy to answer any questions about the implementation or results.