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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Asawa, Parth, Zhu, Alan, O'Neill, Abigail, Zaharia, Matei, Dimakis, Alexandros G., Gonzalez, Joseph E.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02453
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Table of Contents:
  • Frontier language models are deployed as black-box services, where model weights cannot be modified and customization is limited to prompting. We introduce Advisor Models, a method to train small open-weight models to generate dynamic, per-instance natural language advice that improves the capabilities of black-box frontier models. Advisor Models improve GPT-5.2's performance on RuleArena (Taxes) by 27.4%, reduce Gemini 3 Pro's steps taken in SWE agent tasks by 24.6%, and outperform static prompt optimizers in personalizing GPT-5 to user preferences (85-100% vs. 40-60%). We also find that advisors are transferable: an advisor trained with a low-cost student model still transfers improvements to a frontier model. Moreover, Advisor Models are robust: we observe no degradation on other benchmarks than the pipeline is trained on. Our method shows how to perform parametric optimization for black-box frontier models in a practical and cost-effective way.