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Stuart Farmer

Publications and source records attributed to Stuart Farmer.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Concept-Guided Prompting Strategies Increase Diversity in LLM-Generated Recipe Populations

Novelty in solution generation supports automated discovery, but LLM outputs can remain repetitive. To address this, we propose a simple concept-guided prompting method that generates thematic concepts before responses within each of these concepts. To demonstrate, we generated 1,000 recipes for a recipe book task and compared the results against a human-authored corpus. Two naive prompting strategies were compared as baselines. Concept-guided prompting outperformed both baselines in all cases and reached semantic coverage of 47.0% versus 35.1% and 13.1% in respective prior-title and nonce prompt strategies. These findings suggest broader population exploration and diversity, but remain contained to this specific task. Further work is needed to determine the quality of solutions and generalizability.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

EliteTable: Self-Improving Program Search for Executable Control Policies

EliteTable is a self-improving program-search algorithm guided by large language models (LLMs) that uses a fixed-capacity table of high-scoring solutions to guide new proposals, edits of existing solutions, and remixes of several solutions. Performance was evaluated across six Gymnasium control tasks, each with ten generations and fifty candidate slots per generation. Each task was evaluated across ten independently initialized searches. Candidate-score medians rose between the first and final generations in all six tasks, and selected-winner search-score medians rose in five. In CartPole-v1, the selected winner reached the search-score ceiling in the first generation of all ten searches. All ten paired held-out endpoints improved in four of the six tasks. BipedalWalker-v3 and CarRacing-v3 improved without reaching their reporting targets. Six of ten Acrobot-v1 searches declined on held-out episodes, and the median paired change was negative. The results document improvement during program search and the transfer of selected-winner gains to new episodes in some tasks. Comparisons and ablations are needed to establish EliteTable's relative performance and the contributions of its components.

cs.AI↗