ICLR2026
Trinity: An Evolved LLM Coordinator
Jinglue Xu, Qi Sun, Peter Schwendeman, Stefan Nielsen, Edoardo Cetin, Yujin Tang
Abstract
Combining diverse foundation models is promising, but weight-merging is limited by mismatched architectures and closed APIs. Trinity addresses this with a lightweight coordinator that orchestrates collaboration among large language models (LLMs). The coordinator, comprising a compact language model (B parameters) and a lightweight head (K parameters), is optimized with an evolutionary strategy for efficient and adaptive delegation. Trinity processes queries over multiple turns, where at each turn the coordinator assigns one of three roles (Thinker, Worker, or Verifier) to a selected LLM, effectively offloading complex skill acquisition from the coordinator itself. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Trinity consistently outperforms individual models and existing methods in various tasks, including coding, math, reasoning, and domain knowledge, while robustly generalizing to out-of-distribution tasks. On established benchmarks, Trinity achieves state-of-the-art performance, including a new record of on LiveCodeBench. Theoretical and empirical analyses highlight two key factors driving this success: (1) the coordinator’s hidden-state representations provide rich contextualization of inputs, and (2) under high dimensionality and strict budget constraints, the separable Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy algorithm provides substantial advantages over RL, imitation learning, and random search, leveraging potential block--separability.