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arXiv · 2610.36774

Batching the Reflective Optimization Loop: Parallel Proposals Make GEPA Faster and Better

Jialin Zhang·Lakshya A Agrawal·Shangyin Tan·Donghyun Lee·Lutfi Eren Erdogan·Dan Klein·Koushik Sen·Alex Dimakis·Matei Zaharia
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Abstract

Reflective text optimization makes agentic systems better, but the optimization loop is itself a resource-hungry workload whose sequential structure leaves parallel evaluation capacity idle. We extend the open-source GEPA optimizer to propose and evaluate a batch of candidates on each optimization step instead of one candidate at a time. In our sweep on two tasks, most batched runs finished in half the wall-clock time or less, and the fastest in about a quarter to a third. Batched settings also achieved higher held-out test scores, from 68.9% to 72.1% on LiveBench-Math (with $2\times2$) and from 49.0% to 60.0% on HoVer (with $8\times1$). A simple runtime model explains the measured speedups under a finite worker pool, and batched settings also spend their metric-call and dollar budgets more efficiently. We frame the axes along which a reflective optimization step can scale in parallel, a first look at allocating a fixed optimization budget across them.

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Jialin Zhang, Lakshya A Agrawal, Shangyin Tan, Donghyun Lee, Lutfi Eren Erdogan, Dan Klein, Koushik Sen, Alex Dimakis, Matei Zaharia. 2026-10-27. Batching the Reflective Optimization Loop: Parallel Proposals Make GEPA Faster and Better. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36774

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