{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-survey-on-the-optimization-of-large","title":"A Survey on the Optimization of Large Language Model-based Agents","arxiv_id":"2503.12434","date":"2025-03-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["Shangheng Du","Jiabao Zhao","Jinxin Shi","Zhentao Xie","Xin Jiang","Yanhong Bai","Liang He"],"abstract":"With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based agents have been widely adopted in various fields, becoming essential for autonomous decision-making and interactive tasks. However, current work typically relies on prompt design or fine-tuning strategies applied to vanilla LLMs, which often leads to limited effectiveness or suboptimal performance in complex agent-related environments. Although LLM optimization techniques can improve model performance across many general tasks, they lack specialized optimization towards critical agent functionalities such as long-term planning, dynamic environmental interaction, and complex decision-making. Although numerous recent studies have explored various strategies to optimize LLM-based agents for complex agent tasks, a systematic review summarizing and comparing these methods from a holistic perspective is still lacking. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of LLM-based agent optimization approaches, categorizing them into parameter-driven and parameter-free methods. We first focus on parameter-driven optimization, covering fine-tuning-based optimization, reinforcement learning-based optimization, and hybrid strategies, analyzing key aspects such as trajectory data construction, fine-tuning techniques, reward function design, and optimization algorithms. Additionally, we briefly discuss parameter-free strategies that optimize agent behavior through prompt engineering and external knowledge retrieval. Finally, we summarize the datasets and benchmarks used for evaluation and tuning, review key applications of LLM-based agents, and discuss major challenges and promising future directions. Our repository for related references is available at https://github.com/YoungDubbyDu/LLM-Agent-Optimization.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12434v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12434v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-survey-on-the-optimization-of-large","repo_url":"https://github.com/youngdubbydu/llm-agent-optimization","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"large-language-model","task_name":"Large Language Model"},{"task_slug":"prompt-engineering","task_name":"Prompt Engineering"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2503.12434","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}