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

Abstract

We present the AI Training Manager, a bounded LLM-based supervisory controller for adaptive machine learning training. Standard training pipelines often rely on fixed recipes or single-axis schedulers, which can struggle with mid-run failures such as severe overfitting, loss imbalance, exploration collapse, or unsafe exploration. Rather than replacing mathematical optimizers or acting as an unconstrained coding agent, the manager operates through a schema-conditioned interface: it reads structured telemetry snapshots from an active run, audits a constrained action space, and returns validated updates to training parameters such as learning rate, regularization strength, loss-weight coefficients, and exploration settings. We evaluate this architecture across supervised language modeling and reinforcement learning. On TinyStories, the manager detects and corrects overfitting, achieving a validation loss 60% lower than the baseline while producing auditable intervention logs. In this supervised setting, we additionally show that manager inference does not need to block the training loop: training can continue while a manager response is pending, and validated updates can be applied asynchronously once available. In a robotic manipulation reinforcement-learning task, we use the same bounded decision interface in an episodic closed-loop setting, where manager updates are applied at evaluation or checkpoint boundaries. The manager mitigates both conservative and unsafe exploration regimes. These results suggest that schema-conditioned LLMs can serve as bounded supervisory managers for live training runs, complementing conventional optimizers and schedulers with interpretable, multi-axis intervention capabilities