AlgoPilot: Cross-Paradigm Reasoning in Language Models via Strategy Selection and Guidance

Yilun Hao, Ruixiao Yang, Hudson Hilal, Yongchao Chen, Kaizhi Qian +3

Real-world problems span diverse domains, including program synthesis, symbolic reasoning, planning, and optimization, and often require fundamentally different solution paradigms. A central challenge for LLM-based reasoning is twofold: identifying an appropriate problem-solving approach and formulating it correctly. In this paper, we propose AlgoPilot, a cross-paradigm reasoning framework that enables adaptive selection of the solving approaches and structured problem formulation prior to execution. The AlgoPilot framework contains three components: 1) a SteerLM, trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), that adaptively selects the solving strategy (paradigm and modes) based on input problems, 2) the corresponding expert GuideLM, trained via SFT, that generates structured formulation guidance tailored to the selected strategy, and 3) an ExecutionLM that generates solutions conditioned on both the selected strategy and its formulation. Unlike prompting-based methods that rely on fixed reasoning templates, our approach learns to adaptively choose and structure problem-solving strategies based on the input. We build AlgoPilot on Qwen3-8B and evaluate…