Knowing When Not to Reuse: Conditional Experience Transfer in Autonomous LLM Post-Training
Tingyun Li, Wenfeng Feng, Weiqing Li, Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Guohua Liu, Yuewei Zhang
This paper proposes a method to determine which past update evidence in a large language model is still relevant and useful after subsequent training, to prevent wasting compute and potentially degrading the model's performance. Practitioners in the field of autonomous systems and language models might care about this problem because it can lead to better model performance and efficiency in adapting to changing domains and requirements.
Abstract
Large language models offer broad capabilities, but adapting them to evolving domains, tools, and requirements often entails repeated post-training. Autonomous systems automate parts of this process by proposing updates, training candidates, and using evaluation feedback to select subsequent proposals. As evidence accumulates, a central problem emerges: which past update evidence remains actionable after subsequent training has changed the parent model? An update's effect depends on its parent, data, and training stage. Treating past success as context-free permission can waste compute. If the resulting child is promoted, it can also degrade the subsequent training trajectory. We formulate this problem as conditional experience transfer and introduce Boundary-Calibrated Intervention Transfer (BCIT), a method that authorizes experience reuse before weight-changing training. BCIT binds an observed effect to its source context, checks applicability conditions, vetoes candidates with named hard conflicts, and obtains current-state evidence through a bounded training trial when needed. Fully trained candidates still face a shared adoption rule, and only observed events extend memory. On one 4B model adapted across finance reasoning, text-to-SQL, and function calling, candidate updates exhibit heterogeneous target and retention effects across the evaluated contexts. Under matched candidates, evidence, and compute, BCIT authorizes fewer harmful updates and attains higher equal-budget final-model quality than the evaluated alternatives. These results support treating experience authorization as a distinct problem in autonomous post-training.