arXiv Machine Learning

EvoRank: LLM-Guided Evolution of Multi-Objective Learning-to-Rank Pipelines

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 AI
Sep 18

Evolution or Illusion? Rethinking Evaluation in LLM Evolutionary Search

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.

By Tal Oved, Roi Pony, Oshri Naparstek, Udi Barzelay
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

When May a Model Replace the Experiment? Audits, Licenses, and the Price of Trust in Surrogate-Driven Design

arXiv:2608. 01378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Design campaigns in chemistry, materials science, and machine learning share a bottleneck: determining how good a candidate truly is requires an expensive evaluation - an experiment, a first-principles simulation, or a full training run.

By Shuangxiu (Max), Ma (Zachary), Wenhe (Zachary), Zhao
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Enrich-Retrieve-Rank: Scaling Capability Discovery Beyond In-Context Routing

The paper introduces Enrich‑Retrieve‑Rank, a scalable method for discovering capabilities in large agent ecosystems. It replaces in‑context routing with an offline enrichment step that converts sparse metadata into searchable profiles, followed by an online retrieve‑then‑rank pipeline that returns a ranked shortlist without invoking candidates. Experiments show that as the number of capabilities grows from 10 to 7,278, the new approach maintains higher top‑1 accuracy and reduces cost by 70× compared to full‑context baselines.

By Nazib Sorathiya, Daniel Zhang, Bardiya Akhbari
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Evolutionary Ensemble Search: Council-Guided Program Evolution with Persistent Memory

Evolutionary Ensemble Search (EES) is a framework that builds machine‑learning procedures through expert‑guided program evolution. A specialized council interprets task evidence and experimental results to generate structured search directions, which an orchestrator assigns to execution specialists and an evolutionary engine. The engine selects parents, diagnoses errors, and creates descendants via code mutation, pipeline edits, and crossover, with each child evaluated on its own validation evidence. Population archives preserve useful alternatives, and compatible predictions compete in a validation‑gated ensemble stage. Search adapts through parent‑relative operator credit, session memory, and lessons retrieved across runs. The system achieved medal‑threshold artifacts on 19 of 22 tasks (86.36 %) with 11 gold, five silver, and three bronze outcomes across diverse modalities.

By Juan P. Madrigal-Cianci, Eshan Chordia
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Scores Are Not Decisions: Cost-Aware Stopping for Tool Acquisition in LLM Agents

arXiv:2607. 27083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents increasingly depend on diverse external services such as search engines, databases, and connectors, agent harnesses face a fundamental tool-selection challenge: acquiring too few tools leaves the task under-informed, while too many adds cost, context load, and privacy exposure.

By Yicheng Feng, Yan Zhang, Yan Cheng, Wei Qi
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Evaluation Choices Decide the Forecasting Leaderboard: Evidence from a Production Marketplace Panel

The paper demonstrates that the outcome of a forecasting leaderboard is largely determined by the evaluator’s design choices rather than the models themselves. By fixing the data, horizon, and period, the authors varied three key evaluation decisions—unit of analysis, error pooling, and scoring metric—and showed that each can reverse or eliminate the apparent superiority of any forecasting method. The study also evaluates the practical impact of these choices on a deployed system, revealing that the selection rule captures a significant portion of the potential performance gain, and confirms the findings on an external public dataset.

By Md Rezwanul Islam, Wael Mohammed