Evolution Fine-Tuning: Learning to Discover Across 371 Optimization Tasks
arXiv:2606. 29082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Would experience designing faster GPU kernels also help close in on a long-standing open mathematical conjecture?
The paper introduces EMO-STA, a two‑stage evolutionary multi‑task optimization framework for large‑language‑model (LLM) guided program discovery. First, it evolves a shared archive of executable programs across a family of related tasks; then it adapts selected shared candidates to each target task using strategies such as warm‑starting, best‑average, or best‑per‑task adaptation. Experiments on eight diverse task families show that EMO‑STA outperforms single‑task evolution under matched budgets, with balanced shared and adaptation budgets yielding the best results and shared evolution helping to reduce overfitting in low‑evidence scenarios.
arXiv:2606. 29082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Would experience designing faster GPU kernels also help close in on a long-standing open mathematical conjecture?
arXiv:2608. 10795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Successful mutation strategies in evolutionary code search may contain reusable knowledge that is useful beyond a single run, and in some cases may transfer across related tasks and domains.
Successful mutation strategies in evolutionary code search may contain reusable knowledge that is useful beyond a single run, and in some cases may transfer across related tasks and domains. However, existing LLM-driven evolutionary frameworks largely discard such knowledge, repeatedly rediscovering similar ideas and limiting opportunities for cross-run and cross-task learning.
FrugalEvo introduces a cost‑aware evolutionary framework that pairs a high‑cost, powerful LLM with a cheaper LLM to explore and refine program solutions, respectively. It incorporates a cache‑efficient evolution process that maximizes prefix reuse across steps and defines a Budget‑Aware Area Under the Curve (BA‑AUC) metric to evaluate solution quality within a fixed cost budget. Across ten mathematical and systems optimization tasks, FrugalEvo matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art baselines in final solution quality and achieves higher BA‑AUC on nine tasks, while delivering new state‑of‑the‑art performance on circle packing for costs as low as $0.55 to $1.68.
TurboEvolve is a multi‑island evolutionary framework that enhances LLM‑driven program evolution by improving sample efficiency and stability within fixed API‑cost budgets. It introduces Verbalized Sampling to generate multiple diverse candidates in a single LLM call, an adaptive scheduler that adjusts the number of offspring based on progress, and island‑aware initialization that clusters seed programs and mixes subpopulations with elitist preservation. The authors also provide a reusable cross‑task solution‑pool dataset and demonstrate that TurboEvolve achieves better cost‑quality trade‑offs and more stable performance on mathematical discovery and GPU‑kernel optimization tasks compared to controlled baselines.
arXiv:2609.38639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-guided evolutionary search can discover complex programs, but existing methods mostly only save candidate programs and fitness scores while discard...
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. 08189v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-driven program discovery relies on rapid evaluator feedback, but many scientific and engineering tasks require high-fidelity simulations, hardware execution, or physical experiments, making each evaluation expensive.
HEMO is a novel framework for automatic operator design (AOD) in multi‑objective combinatorial optimization that treats the harness itself as a self‑evolving target. It maintains a persistent harness state and updates modules—such as experience retrieval, operator improvement, parent selection, and search orchestration—one at a time, guided by downstream solution quality, runtime, and a discounted UCB scheduler. Experiments on eight MOCO tasks and two evolutionary backbones show that HEMO outperforms conventional evolutionary, neural, and LLM‑based AOD baselines and can transfer effectively to related tasks.
The paper introduces TOPOFE, a framework that treats automatic feature engineering for tabular data as a graph-structured multi-island evolutionary search. Each island explores a semantically coherent family of transformations using LLM-guided mutation and crossover, while a Prompt Adaptation Memory steers proposals based on accept/reject feedback. TOPOFE dynamically learns a directed topology graph to coordinate cross-island transfer, enabling the discovery of compositional feature programs that outperform state‑of‑the‑art methods on 29 datasets and produce lower redundancy and higher representational coverage.
arXiv:2608. 03129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model-assisted Evolutionary Search (LES) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for automated algorithm design.
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.