GradReason: LLMs as Meta-Learners that Replace Training Epochs with Training-Data-Free Weight Updates

arXiv:2611.11005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard training recipes make a fixed number of passes over the training data, even when an epoch mostly adds mini-batch noise. We study whether a large language model (LLM) that reads the weight and gradient history of a run can replace some of these epochs with updates that compute no gradient and read no training image. In GradReason, an LLM agent is called every ten epochs. In a restricted sandbox, it analyses recent weight snapshots, epoch-mean gradients, and validation metrics, then submits a Python program that computes new weights and a plan marking each of the next ten epochs as data or virtual. A virtual epoch is kept only if it passes a forward-only check on 5,000 held-out validation images. In 120 runs on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with three architectures, Claude Opus 5.5 used 32.8% fewer data epochs than the 80-epoch recipe at 0.31 percentage points lower test accuracy (95% CI -0.72 to +0.09; 0.94 points on ResNet-18), on the recipe's own frontier of data against accuracy. Unprompted, Opus averaged recent weight snapshots in every run. This choice produced the savings: a fixed rule with the same acceptance check but extrapolations from prior work saved 5.4% of the data epochs, and the same rule with averaging added saved 25.0%. The LLM's contribution is to find a working update within a single run; once found, a fixed rule implements it equally well. An Opus run cost 0.68 USD, but at this scale the agent's latency exceeded the GPU time it saved.