The paper critiques the common practice of evaluating large‑language‑model (LLM) evolutionary search methods using a single seed and fixed iteration budget, arguing that this approach is insufficient. By testing three search strategies across five optimization tasks and varying both the number of seeds (width) and iterations (depth), the authors find that optimal budget allocation depends on the strategy, task, and total budget, and that strategy rankings shift with different budgets. They propose a measurement protocol that maps the seeds‑by‑iterations frontier and offers practical guidance for researchers.
arXiv:2608. 05651v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly.
arXiv:2605.29268v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-guided evolutionary search (Evolve systems) has reached state-of-the-art results on mathematical and combinatorial tasks, yet most existi...
The paper introduces ExTS, a tree‑search policy designed for budget‑constrained agentic search where evaluation and generation costs are high. ExTS treats expansion as a value‑of‑information decision, combining discriminative reward shaping, a stochastic virtual child, and quality‑conditioned branching to allocate budget more effectively. Experiments on prompt optimization, code generation, molecular structure elucidation, and agentic workflow optimization show ExTS matching or surpassing task‑specific baselines with an average gain of +5.5% using a single configuration, and the authors also present pilot‑run diagnostics to guide adaptation to different problem structures.
arXiv:2607. 24647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven autonomous research (AR) systems are becoming increasingly effective across a broad range of tasks.
Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly. A natural alternative is to combine cheap and strong models under a fixed inference budget.
arXiv:2606. 02863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-Driven Research Systems (ADRS) -- systems coupling LLMs with automated evaluation to discover algorithms, proofs, and designs -- are being optimized and adopted across domains, but the tools to analyze them have not kept pace.
Black-box combinatorial optimization requires systematically identifying high-quality solutions under a limited evaluation budget, yet the unknown objective function provides little guidance for deciding where the search should explore next. We introduce SCOPE, a general framework for Synthetic Conditional Objectives for Policy Evolution in Black-Box Combinatorial Optimization.
The paper examines test‑time scaling (TTS) methods that use extra inference compute to improve language model outputs. Across five open‑ended benchmarks—medicine, law, finance, general chat, and creative writing—the study finds that increasing exploration (generating more candidates) consistently yields better top candidates, but exploitation (selecting the final output) remains weak due to poor reward‑model correlation. Only the Fusion approach, which synthesizes candidates, reliably improves results, yet it recovers only about 40% of the potential quality, indicating that the bottleneck lies in choosing from the candidate pool rather than generating it.
EvoRank is an open autonomous ranking engineer that uses an LLM-guided evolutionary loop to automatically design complete Learning-to-Rank pipelines—including features, models, losses, and ensembles—for multi-objective e-commerce search. On the Expedia ICDM 2013 dataset, EvoRank converged within 50 iterations on interpretable pipelines that outperform an Optuna-tuned LambdaMART on 60k held-out queries and rank in the top 6 % of the original competition. The authors also introduce a headroom gate that predicts whether the evolutionary loop will be worthwhile before any LLM computation, and they release the system, auditing tools, and a catalog of failure modes to help teams apply the method to their own ranking stacks.
arXiv:2608. 06714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent systems for optimizing prompts, programs, and ML workflows typically rely on explicit outer-loop controllers such as evolutionary search, bandits, or textual-gradient methods.
arXiv:2607. 18235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous discovery systems such as OpenEvolve and TTT-Discover are often used as general-purpose harnesses.
arXiv:2608. 10694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evolutionary optimization of LLM prompts and agentic programs (e.