Stanford CS 329Z Lecture 9 Outlines the Selection of Agent System Optimization Methods
Lecture 9 of Stanford's CS 329Z course presents a selection diagram for Agent system optimization: the prerequisite for optimization is having data, a system, and evaluation metrics all in place; generally, context optimization (prompts and few-shots) is done first because it is cheap, fast, and sample-efficient; when context optimization is insufficient, or when you want to distill capabilities into a small model, or when prompts grow longer and longer, then you move on to changing the weights. The lecture notes also review reflective prompt optimization methods such as OPRO, MIPROv2, TextGrad, and GEPA; weight optimization paths such as SFT, RL (PPO vs. GRPO), and on-policy distillation; and approaches that let agents self-optimize, such as the Darwin Gödel Machine, Meta-Harness, and karpathy's autoresearch. They also point out that agents are already decent optimizers, making evaluation metrics the link that most needs to be controlled.
nger, then you move on to changing the weights. The lecture notes also review reflective prompt optimization methods such as OPRO, MIPROv2, TextGrad, and GEPA; weight optimization paths such as SFT, RL (PPO vs. GRPO), and on-policy distillation; and approaches that let agents self-optimize, such as the Darwin Gödel Machine, Meta-Harness, and karpathy's autoresearch. They also point out that agents are already decent optimizers, making evaluation metrics the link that most needs to be controlled.
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