Post
11504
The space of possible improvements for your AI model is large while evaluation is costly.
So I was excited to discover the ICML 2026 paper from Kobalczyk, Lin, Letham, Zhao, Balandat, and Bakshy titled "LILO: Bayesian Optimization with Natural Language Feedback."
The method learns efficiently from expert preferences, balancing exploration and exploitation in a principled way with Bayesian Optimization for expensive-to-evaluate black-box objectives.
Experimenting with the technique, I trained a Gaussian Process proxy model on the implicit preferences in my code repo's commit history at VQASynth.
The result: I used the model's preference scores to re-rank candidate papers recommended based on my interests in spatial reasoning and multimodal data synthesis.
Semantic relevance is a high-recall method for finding arXiv papers personalized to your interests. Adding contributor preferences, extracted from the merge history of your code offers a high-precision filter.
So what's next? I'm using the model to synthesize a larger volume of preference data to finetune an open-weight coding model with DPO and LoRA. Tuning Coding Agents via Implicit Preference Distillation
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17671
Substack: https://remyxai.substack.com/p/lilo-and-myx
VQASynth: https://github.com/remyxai/VQASynth
So I was excited to discover the ICML 2026 paper from Kobalczyk, Lin, Letham, Zhao, Balandat, and Bakshy titled "LILO: Bayesian Optimization with Natural Language Feedback."
The method learns efficiently from expert preferences, balancing exploration and exploitation in a principled way with Bayesian Optimization for expensive-to-evaluate black-box objectives.
Experimenting with the technique, I trained a Gaussian Process proxy model on the implicit preferences in my code repo's commit history at VQASynth.
The result: I used the model's preference scores to re-rank candidate papers recommended based on my interests in spatial reasoning and multimodal data synthesis.
Semantic relevance is a high-recall method for finding arXiv papers personalized to your interests. Adding contributor preferences, extracted from the merge history of your code offers a high-precision filter.
So what's next? I'm using the model to synthesize a larger volume of preference data to finetune an open-weight coding model with DPO and LoRA. Tuning Coding Agents via Implicit Preference Distillation
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17671
Substack: https://remyxai.substack.com/p/lilo-and-myx
VQASynth: https://github.com/remyxai/VQASynth
- 1 reply
