Iterative Deployment Improves Planning Skills in LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Corrêa, Augusto B., Gelberg, Yoav, Melo, Luckeciano C., Shumailov, Ilia, Pereira, André G., Gal, Yarin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Corrêa, Augusto B.
Gelberg, Yoav
Melo, Luckeciano C.
Shumailov, Ilia
Pereira, André G.
Gal, Yarin
author_facet Corrêa, Augusto B.
Gelberg, Yoav
Melo, Luckeciano C.
Shumailov, Ilia
Pereira, André G.
Gal, Yarin
contents We show that iterative deployment of large language models (LLMs), each fine-tuned on data carefully curated by users from the previous models' deployment, can significantly change the properties of the resultant models. By testing this mechanism on various planning domains, we observe substantial improvements in planning skills, with later models displaying emergent generalization by discovering much longer plans than the initial models. We then provide theoretical analysis showing that iterative deployment effectively implements reinforcement learning (RL) training in the outer-loop (i.e. not as part of intentional model training), with an implicit reward function. The connection to RL has two important implications: first, for the field of AI safety, as the reward function entailed by repeated deployment is not defined explicitly, and could have unexpected implications to the properties of future model deployments. Second, the mechanism highlighted here can be viewed as an alternative training regime to explicit RL, relying on data curation rather than explicit rewards.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_24940
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Iterative Deployment Improves Planning Skills in LLMs
Corrêa, Augusto B.
Gelberg, Yoav
Melo, Luckeciano C.
Shumailov, Ilia
Pereira, André G.
Gal, Yarin
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
We show that iterative deployment of large language models (LLMs), each fine-tuned on data carefully curated by users from the previous models' deployment, can significantly change the properties of the resultant models. By testing this mechanism on various planning domains, we observe substantial improvements in planning skills, with later models displaying emergent generalization by discovering much longer plans than the initial models. We then provide theoretical analysis showing that iterative deployment effectively implements reinforcement learning (RL) training in the outer-loop (i.e. not as part of intentional model training), with an implicit reward function. The connection to RL has two important implications: first, for the field of AI safety, as the reward function entailed by repeated deployment is not defined explicitly, and could have unexpected implications to the properties of future model deployments. Second, the mechanism highlighted here can be viewed as an alternative training regime to explicit RL, relying on data curation rather than explicit rewards.
title Iterative Deployment Improves Planning Skills in LLMs
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24940