Inheritance as an Admission Test for LLM Prompt Merge Operators

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) agents are often improved by iterating until a fixed verifier is done. Once that verifier saturates, the loop has nothing left to climb. We instead score agents against the current population, and a frozen panel records whether anyone got better. The panel mean can rise inside the seeds by elimination alone. We therefore count a run as training only when its final mean beats the best generation-zero member. A merge is admitted only when the child moves toward the donor, past the child the same operator produces at zero dose, and the lower confidence bound on that movement reaches half the requested dose. That is the admission test. A detectable shortfall rejects the operator, and the test is otherwise undetermined. We keep realised fitness ϕas the selector and reference performance θas the unused ruler. Every measurement uses gemini-3.1-flash-lite on one negotiation task, and no fixed-oracle arm was run. In the open loop, tactic append grafts short donor rules and is admitted. Free rewrite moves only a third of the requested dose and is rejected. Template append pastes raw donor replies into the child. Its movement clears the bound on the first probe but not on the re-probe, and it is left undetermined. A held-out re-probe on the five situations the merge never saw confirms that both appends move, and it does not rescue free rewrite. Neither append rises with the dose. Constrained rewrite is admitted in the open loop and was not run in the closed loop, which changes only the operator. The population, the scores and the task stay fixed. No free-rewrite run beats the best generation-zero member. Every tactic-append run and every template-append run does. Sampled loop children keep that split. Free rewrite moves no further toward the donor, and both appends still clear the bound, by less than in the open loop.