arXiv:2602. 00549v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) shows promise in Large Language Model (LLM) based Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD), it suffers from a critical over-exploitation tendency under the limited computational budgets required for heuristic evaluation.
arXiv:2608.30395v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As pretraining scaling laws approach saturation, Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has emerged as an important direction for improving reasoning by allocating in...
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:2602. 09574v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tree-search decoding is an effective form of test-time scaling for large language models (LLMs), but real-world deployment often imposes a fixed per-query token budget that varies across settings.
arXiv:2606. 26657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying high-utility candidates from massive discrete spaces under expensive evaluations is a recurring challenge across the sciences, with structure-based drug discovery as a prominent example.
arXiv:2607. 02915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In many scientific and engineering domains, maximizing discovery within a limited sampling budget demands strategic, observation-guided exploration.
arXiv:2606. 10587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are on the rise for accelerating scientific discovery, most recently in advanced tasks such as generating valid scientific hypotheses.
Inference-time search with large language models (LLMs) often concentrates on a small set of structurally or semantically similar trajectories, leaving alternatives underexplored---a failure mode we c...
The paper introduces Bayesian Optimization (BO) techniques that incorporate rich auxiliary information—such as training curves, expert notes, images, and prior knowledge—using large language models (LLMs). Three new methods are proposed to integrate this auxiliary data into BO, and they are evaluated on hyperparameter optimization benchmarks and a real-world nuclear fusion task. The results show that these LLM-enhanced BO methods consistently outperform standard BO and existing LLM-based optimization approaches.
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:2606. 30335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous scientific discovery systems increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to propose new hypotheses, but many such systems condition primarily on experimental memory: archives of high-scoring candidates or heuristic summaries of recent trials.
The paper introduces BASIN, a training‑free, structure‑aware selection method that groups reasoning states into basins and penalizes repeated visits to the same strategy, thereby redistributing search across distinct reasoning paths within a fixed compute budget. BASIN outperforms the Tree of Thoughts (ToT) baseline by up to +22 percentage points on Game of 24 and +6.7 percentage points on MuSR, and its quality‑aware variant QA‑BASIN further enhances robustness by preserving high‑quality basins. The authors also define a redundancy gap metric, Δ, to quantify how search concentrates differently for correct versus incorrect predictions, showing that ToT often operates near Δ ≈ 0 while BASIN consistently shifts Δ positive.
EvoTreeNAD is a genealogy‑guided evolutionary algorithm that autonomously discovers neural architectures without a predefined seed or search space. Starting from an empty root, it builds a persistent genealogy where each node represents a complete architecture; top‑percentile values from nodes and descendants steer lineage selection. The method combines an Idea Agent that proposes variants and a Code Agent that implements them, with theoretical analysis showing stationary variation regimes and empirical results demonstrating superior performance on CIFAR‑10/100 and MedMNIST‑v2 tasks.