13.4CLJul 7
InfluMatch: Frontier-Quality KOL Search at 4B-Model CostKrittanon Kaewtawee, Petmongkon Pornpichitsuwan, Natchaya Temyingyong et al.
Matching influencers (KOLs) to free-form, multi-part Thai marketing criteria is today served either by keyword search over structured profiles, which misses semantic fit, or by prompting frontier LLMs over every candidate, which is accurate but slow and expensive. We present InfluMatch, a low-cost three-stage cascade -- retrieval $\rightarrow$ rerank $\rightarrow$ reason -- built entirely from small open-weight models: dense retrieval returns 50 candidates, a 4B pointwise reranker scores each by the log-probability of a single Yes token and keeps 10, and a 4B reasoner grades the shortlist per criterion on a rubric with a Thai rationale. The cascade is designed for cost: reasoning over a filtered top-10 halves token spend versus reasoning over all 50 while scoring 14 points higher. End-to-end against human relevance labels on an 11-query set with all 50 candidates labeled, the full cascade reaches 94.1% P@5, versus a retrieval-only baseline near random; it matches the frontier model Kimi-K2.6 (91.8%) while emitting ${\sim}35\times$ fewer output tokens and serving a 50-KOL query in ${\sim}20$ s on one A100. Notably, the only fine-tuning that pays off is pairwise: a SimPO-tuned reranker matches the frontier baseline's best-pick accuracy (78.0 EM), whereas fine-tuning the reasoner on pointwise per-criterion labels improves offline scores yet degrades end-to-end ranking -- an inversion we trace to the design of the absolute labeling task -- leaving the untuned base model as the strongest deployed reasoner. The result is a deployable, explainable KOL search system at a small fraction of frontier serving cost.
3.3AIDec 30, 2025
ROAD: Reflective Optimization via Automated Debugging for Zero-Shot Agent AlignmentNatchaya Temyingyong, Daman Jain, Neeraj Kumarsahu et al.
Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance, yet current state-of-the-art methods typically rely on large, labeled gold-standard development sets to compute fitness scores for evolutionary or Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches. In real-world software engineering, however, such curated datasets are rarely available during the initial cold start of agent development, where engineers instead face messy production logs and evolving failure modes. We present ROAD (Reflective Optimization via Automated Debugging), a novel framework that bypasses the need for refined datasets by treating optimization as a dynamic debugging investigation rather than a stochastic search. Unlike traditional mutation strategies, ROAD utilizes a specialized multi-agent architecture, comprising an Analyzer for root-cause analysis, an Optimizer for pattern aggregation, and a Coach for strategy integration, to convert unstructured failure logs into robust, structured Decision Tree Protocols. We evaluated ROAD across both a standardized academic benchmark and a live production Knowledge Management engine. Experimental results demonstrate that ROAD is highly sample-efficient, achieving a 5.6 percent increase in success rate (73.6 percent to 79.2 percent) and a 3.8 percent increase in search accuracy within just three automated iterations. Furthermore, on complex reasoning tasks in the retail domain, ROAD improved agent performance by approximately 19 percent relative to the baseline. These findings suggest that mimicking the human engineering loop of failure analysis and patching offers a viable, data-efficient alternative to resource-intensive RL training for deploying reliable LLM agents.