Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities. This has led to increasing interest in optimizing instructions for black-box LLMs, whose internal parameters are inaccessible but widely used due to their strong performance. To optimize instructions for black-box LLMs, recent methods employ white-box LLMs to generate candidate instructions from optimized soft prompts. However, white-box LLMs often map different soft prompts to the same instruction, leading to redundant queries. While previous studies regarded this many-to-one mapping as a structure that hinders optimization efficiency, we reinterpret it as a useful prior knowledge that can accelerate the optimization.

Despite the impressive generative abilities of black-box large language models (LLMs), their inherent opacity hinders further advancements in capabilities such as reasoning, planning, and personalization. Existing works aim to enhance LLM capabilities via domain-specific adaptation, which require additional training on accessible model parameters, an infeasible option for black-box LLMs. To address this challenge, we introduce Matryoshka Pilot(M-Pilot), a lightweight white-box LLM controller that guides a large-scale black-box LLM generator by decomposing complex tasks into a series of intermediate outputs. Specifically, we consider the black-box LLM as an environment, with M-Pilot serving as a policy to provide intermediate guidance through prompts for driving the black-box LLM. M-Pilot is trained to pivot the outputs of the black-box LLM aligning with preferences during iterative interaction, which enables controllable multi-turn generation and self-improvement in optimizing intermediate guidance. Empirical evaluations on diverse tasks demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the capabilities of black-box LLMs in complex, long-horizon tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities. This raised interest in optimizing instructions for black-box LLMs, whose internal parameters are inaccessible but popular for their strong performance and ease of use. Recent approaches leverage white-box LLMs to assist instruction optimization for black-box LLMs by generating instructions from soft prompts. However, white-box LLMs often map different soft prompts to the same instruction, leading to redundant queries to the black-box model. While previous studies regarded this many-to-one mapping as a redundancy to be avoided, we reinterpret it as useful prior knowledge that can enhance the optimization performance. To this end, we introduce PREimage-informed inSTruction Optimization (PRESTO), a novel framework that leverages the preimage structure of soft prompts to improve query efficiency. PRESTO consists of three key components: (1) score sharing, which shares the evaluation score with all soft prompts in a preimage; (2) preimage-based initialization, which select initial data points that maximize search space coverage using preimage information; and (3) score consistency regularization, which enforces prediction consistency within each preimage. By leveraging preimages, PRESTO observes 14 times more scored data under the same query budget, resulting in more efficient optimization. Experimental results on 33 instruction optimization tasks demonstrate the superior performance of PRESTO.

Despite the impressive generative abilities of black-box large language models (LLMs), their inherent opacity hinders further advancements in capabilities such as reasoning, planning, and personalization. Existing works aim to enhance LLM capabilities via domain-specific adaptation, which require additional training on accessible model parameters, an infeasible option for black-box LLMs. To address this challenge, we introduce Matryoshka Pilot (M-Pilot), a lightweight white-box LLM controller that guides a large-scale black-box LLM generator by decomposing complex tasks into a series of intermediate outputs. Specifically, we consider the black-box LLM as an environment, with M-Pilot serving as a policy to provide intermediate guidance through prompts for driving the black-box LLM. M-Pilot is trained to pivot the outputs of the black-box LLM aligning with preferences during iterative interaction, which enables controllable multi-turn generation and self-improvement in optimizing intermediate guidance. Empirical evaluations on diverse tasks demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the capabilities of black-box LLMs in complex, long-horizon tasks.

Human-Oriented Binary Reverse Engineering (HOBRE) lies at the intersection of binary and source code, aiming to lift binary code to human-readable content relevant to source code, thereby bridging the binary-source semantic gap. Recent advancements in uni-modal code model pre-training, particularly in generative Source Code Foundation Models (SCFMs) and binary understanding models, have laid the groundwork for transfer learning applicable to HOBRE. However, existing approaches for HOBRE rely heavily on uni-modal models like SCFMs for supervised fine-tuning or general LLMs for prompting, resulting in sub-optimal performance. Inspired by recent progress in large multi-modal models, we propose that it is possible to harness the strengths of uni-modal code models from both sides to bridge the semantic gap effectively. In this paper, we introduce a novel probe-and-recover framework that incorporates a binary-source encoder-decoder model and black-box LLMs for binary analysis. Our approach leverages the pre-trained knowledge within SCFMs to synthesize relevant, symbol-rich code fragments as context. This additional context enables black-box LLMs to enhance recovery accuracy. We demonstrate significant improvements in zero-shot binary summarization and binary function name recovery, with a 10.3% relative gain in CHRF and a 16.7% relative gain in a GPT4-based metric for summarization, as well as a 6.7% and 7.4% absolute increase in token-level precision and recall for name recovery, respectively.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities. This has led to increasing interest in optimizing instructions for black-box LLMs, whose internal parameters are inaccessible but widely used due to their strong performance. To optimize instructions for black-box LLMs, recent methods employ white-box LLMs to generate candidate instructions from optimized soft prompts. However, white-box LLMs often map different soft prompts to the same instruction, leading to redundant queries. While previous studies regarded this many-to-one mapping as a structure that hinders optimization efficiency, we reinterpret it as a useful prior knowledge that can accelerate the optimization. To this end, we introduce PREimage-informed inSTruction Optimization (PRESTO), a novel framework that leverages the preimage structure of soft prompts for efficient optimization. PRESTO consists of three key components: (1) score sharing, which shares the evaluation score with all soft prompts in a preimage; (2) preimage-based initialization, which selects initial data points that maximize search space coverage using preimage information; and (3) score consistency regularization, which enforces prediction consistency within each preimage. By leveraging preimages, PRESTO achieves the effect of effectively obtaining 14 times more scored data under the same query budget, resulting in more efficient optimization. Experimental results on 33 instruction optimization tasks demonstrate the superior performance of PRESTO. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/PRESTO

Large language models are highly sensitive to prompt wording. However, popular automatic prompt search methods, including InstructZero, often degrade under distribution shift and adversarial evaluation because they optimize expected performance under a single evaluation distribution. Consequently, prompts that work in one setting frequently fail to transfer. To address this, DRO-InstructZero formulates zero-shot prompt optimization as robust Bayesian optimization. Specifically, an f-divergence ball defines an ambiguity set around the evaluation distribution, and a robust acquisition rule maximizes worst-case expected utility while retaining the query efficiency of Bayesian search. Therefore, the search explicitly targets reliability under distribution shift rather than average behavior alone. Experiments follow the instruction-induction protocol with matched query budgets across formality rewriting, code debugging, and translation. For example, on BIG-Bench informative-to-formal rewriting, accuracy improves from 61.3 +/- 0.7% to approximately 85-90%, yielding an absolute gain of about 25-30 points. Moreover, auto-debugging shows about +25-point gains under domain shift. Meanwhile, stable tasks such as cause-and-effect remain above 96%, indicating no loss on in-distribution cases. Furthermore, improvements are consistent across divergence choices and decoding temperatures. Overall, DRO-InstructZero connects distributionally robust optimization with prompt learning, offering a plug-and-play and general approach for reliable, transferable prompt alignment under real-world uncertainty.

Personalization has emerged as a critical research area in modern intelligent systems, focusing on mining users' behavioral history and adapting to their preferences

Human-Oriented Binary Reverse Engineering (HOBRE) lies at the intersection of binary and source code, aiming to lift binary code to human-readable content relevant to source code, thereby bridging the binary-source semantic gap. Recent advancements in uni-modal code model pre-training, particularly in generative Source Code Foundation Models (SCFMs) and binary understanding models, have laid the groundwork for transfer learning applicable to HOBRE. However, existing approaches for HOBRE rely heavily on uni-modal models like SCFMs for supervised fine-tuning or general LLMs for prompting, resulting in sub-optimal performance. Inspired by recent progress in large multi-modal models, we propose that it is possible to harness the strengths of uni-modal code models from both sides to bridge the semantic gap effectively. In this paper, we introduce a novel probe-and-recover framework that incorporates a binary-source encoder-decoder model and black-box LLMs for binary analysis.