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Developing effective machine learning models requires complex manual tuning, while current Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) frameworks remain domain-specific and isolate model architecture, training hyperparameter, and data ratio optimization. Here, we bridge this gap by proposing a universal, large language model (LLM)-based AutoML framework that jointly optimizes these configurations for the first time without the need for task-specific fine-tuning. We propose NCode, a unified numerical encoding scheme that translates diverse AutoML design choices into universal discrete sequences and effectively reframes the optimization process as a unified ranking task. Trained solely on optimization trajectories derived from a limited, single-domain vision task, the proposed LLM-based searcher demonstrates impressive cross-task, cross-modality and joint search-space optimization generalizability, achieving state-of-the-art performance across image classification, image segmentation, speaker verification and text-to-image benchmarks. Crucially, it exhibits superior scalability in the large-scale training and joint optimization of a billion-parameter Diffusion Transformer, requiring 896 GPU-days and attaining a state-of-the-art GenEval score of 0.91. By leveraging reinforcement learning to instill Chain-of-Thought reasoning, we provide a systematic way to interpret the LLM-based searcher's internal decision-making mechanisms, revealing its optimization strategy shifted from the early-stage diversity-driven exploration to the late-stage anchor exploitation. Our proposed framework provides a scalable, generalizable, and interpretable pathway toward general-purpose open-world machine learning optimization.

In long context scenarios, large language models (LLMs) face three main challenges: higher computational cost, performance reduction, and position bias. Research indicates that LLM performance hinges on the density and position of key information in the input prompt. Inspired by these findings, we propose LongLLMLingua for prompt compression towards improving LLMs' perception of the key information to simultaneously address the three challenges. Our extensive evaluation across various long context scenarios demonstrates that LongLLMLingua not only enhances performance but also significantly reduces costs and latency. For instance, in the NaturalQuestions benchmark, LongLLMLingua boosts performance by up to 21.4% with around 4x fewer tokens in GPT-3.5-Turbo, leading to substantial cost savings. It achieves a 94.0% cost reduction in the LooGLE benchmark. Moreover, when compressing prompts of about 10k tokens at ratios of 2x-6x, LongLLMLingua can accelerate end-to-end latency by 1.4x-2.6x. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/LongLLMLingua.

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift, with breakthroughs achieved by systems orchestrating multiple large language models (LLMs) and other complex components. As a result, developing principled and automated optimization methods for compound AI systems is one of the most important new challenges. Neural networks faced a similar challenge in its early days until backpropagation and automatic differentiation transformed the field by making optimization turn-key. Inspired by this, we introduce TextGrad, a powerful framework performing automatic ``differentiation'' via text. TextGrad backpropagates textual feedback provided by LLMs to improve individual components of a compound AI system. In our framework, LLMs provide rich, general, natural language suggestions to optimize variables in computation graphs, ranging from code snippets to molecular structures. TextGrad follows PyTorch's syntax and abstraction and is flexible and easy-to-use. It works out-of-the-box for a variety of tasks, where the users only provide the objective function without tuning components or prompts of the framework. We showcase TextGrad's effectiveness and generality across a diverse range of applications, from question answering and molecule optimization to radiotherapy treatment planning. Without modifying the framework, TextGrad improves the zero-shot accuracy of GPT-4o in Google-Proof Question Answering from $51\%$ to $55\%$, yields $20\%$ relative performance gain in optimizing LeetCode-Hard coding problem solutions, improves prompts for reasoning, designs new druglike small molecules with desirable in silico binding, and designs radiation oncology treatment plans with high specificity. TextGrad lays a foundation to accelerate the development of the next-generation of AI systems.