Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) has emerged as a transformative approach for solving combinatorial optimization problems. While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods have shown promise, they predominantly rely on fixed evolutionary operators and struggle to effectively accumulate and reuse historical search experience.
arXiv:2608. 03636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model-based automated heuristic design (LLM-AHD) has shown strong potential in discovering effective heuristics for combinatorial optimization problems.
arXiv:2607. 11916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with evolutionary computation has emerged as a powerful paradigm for automated heuristic design in combinatorial optimization.
OR-Agent is a multi‑agent research framework that automates heuristic design for optimization problems by structuring heuristic search as a tree‑based workflow with explicit hypothesis generation and systematic backtracking. It introduces a hierarchical, optimization‑inspired reflection system that uses short‑term reflections as verbal gradients, long‑term reflections as verbal momentum, and memory compression as semantic weight decay to guide research dynamics. Experiments on classical combinatorial optimization tasks and simulation‑based cooperative driving scenarios show that OR‑Agent outperforms strong evolutionary search baselines, with all code and data publicly available.
arXiv:2602. 13769v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating heuristic design in complex, experiment-driven domains requires more than iterative mutation of solution algorithms.
arXiv:2606. 14202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) by enabling heuristic generation through reasoning and code synthesis.
arXiv:2606. 00718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in Automated Heuristic Design (AHD), existing methods typically generate and evolve heuristics as a single operator or search strategy, limiting their ability to model strong coupling among multiple decision substructures in problems such as the Traveling Thief Problem (TTP) and the Traveling Purchaser Problem (TPP).
arXiv:2609.00023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we introduce ES-AHD, a novel framework that fundamentally integrates Evolution Strategy (ES) into Large Language Model (LLM)-driven Au...
arXiv:2505.15741v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Evolutionary Computation (EC) are increasingly being combined to support automated optimization, algorithm d...
ATLAS is an embedding‑guided quality‑diversity framework that enables scaffold‑free synthesis of full algorithms for combinatorial optimization using large language models. It allows the LLM to freely choose, restructure, and control algorithm components while automatically detecting and repairing execution, interface, and feasibility failures. Across four NP‑hard problems, ATLAS outperforms state‑of‑the‑art component‑synthesis methods and remains competitive with strong human‑designed algorithms, demonstrating that a larger design space can be practically searched.
The paper introduces LLM-EBG, an evolutionary framework that uses a large language model as a generative operator to automatically create optimization benchmarks. By generating unconstrained single-objective continuous minimization problems expressed as mathematical formulas, the framework can produce benchmarks that consistently favor a target algorithm over a comparison algorithm in over 80% of trials. Landscape analysis shows that these generated problems exhibit distinct geometric traits, such as sensitivity to variable scaling, reflecting the search behaviors of different optimization methods.
arXiv:2605. 08756v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automatic heuristic design (AHD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems (COPs).