Coleman Hooper
Publications
Squeeze Evolve: Unified Multi-Model Orchestration for Verifier-Free Evolution
We show that verifier-free evolution is bottlenecked by both diversity and efficiency: without external correction, repeated evolution accelerates collapse toward narrow modes, while the uniform use of a high-cost model wastes compute and quickly becomes economically impractical. We introduce Squeeze Evolve, a unified multi-model orchestration framework for verifier-free evolutionary inference. Our approach is guided by a simple principle: allocate model capability where it has the highest marginal utility. Stronger models are reserved for high-impact stages, while cheaper models handle the other stages at much lower costs. This principle addresses diversity and cost-efficiency jointly while remaining lightweight. Squeeze Evolve naturally supports open-source, closed-source, and mixed-model deployments. Across AIME 2025, HMMT 2025, LiveCodeBench V6, GPQA-Diamond, ARC-AGI-V2, and multimodal vision benchmarks, such as MMMU-Pro and BabyVision, Squeeze Evolve consistently improves the cost-capability frontier over single-model evolution and achieves new state-of-the-art results on several tasks. Empirically, Squeeze Evolve reduces API cost by up to $\sim$3$\times$ and increases fixed-budget serving throughput by up to $\sim$10$\times$. Moreover, on discovery tasks, Squeeze Evolve is the first verifier-free evolutionary method to match, and in some cases exceed, the performance of verifier-based evolutionary methods.
Residual Context Diffusion Language Models
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a "remasking" mechanism that decodes only the most confident tokens and discards the rest, effectively wasting computation. We demonstrate that recycling computation from the discarded tokens is beneficial, as these tokens retain contextual information useful for subsequent decoding iterations. In light of this, we propose Residual Context Diffusion (RCD), a module that converts these discarded token representations into contextual residuals and injects them back for the next denoising step. RCD uses a decoupled two-stage training pipeline to bypass the memory bottlenecks associated with backpropagation. We validate our method on both long CoT reasoning (SDAR) and short CoT instruction following (LLaDA) models. We demonstrate that a standard dLLM can be efficiently converted to the RCD paradigm with merely ~1 billion tokens. RCD consistently improves frontier dLLMs by 5-10 points in accuracy with minimal extra computation overhead across a wide range of benchmarks. Notably, on the most challenging AIME tasks, RCD nearly doubles baseline accuracy and attains up to 4-5x fewer denoising steps at equivalent accuracy levels.