David Duvenaud: gradient-free 'poor-man's RL' on scaffolds works but is far slower

DavidDuvenaud · x · 2026-10-31

In a technical exchange about test-time compute scaling, David Duvenaud notes that even when training plans disallow RL rollouts for models being trained, one can still do a 'poor-man's RL' via gradient-free tuning of context and scaffolds — though he concedes it remains far slower than native RL.

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