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.
arXiv:2607. 27953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) underpin many real-world decisions, but their exponentially large search spaces make high-quality solutions costly to obtain.
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:2602. 08261v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Auto-bidding systems strive to maximize marketing value while maintaining high compliance with efficiency constraints, such as Target Cost-Per-Action (CPA).
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:2607. 00691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Black-box optimization is a fundamental science and engineering tool that makes it possible to optimize objectives without gradient information.
arXiv:2607. 23408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Expensive black-box optimization is ubiquitous in science and engineering, where function evaluations are costly and the evaluation budget is limited.
arXiv:2606. 00862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms (SAEAs) have been widely used for expensive black-box optimization problems.
arXiv:2605. 04267v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive multi-objective optimization systems face a budget allocation dilemma: one can spend resources on expensive objective evaluations or on eliciting decision-maker preferences that identify the relevant region of the Pareto set.
arXiv:2501. 17377v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising approach for solving Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems, such as the 3D Bin Packing Problem (3D-BPP), Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), or Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), but these neural solvers often exhibit brittleness when facing distribution shifts.
Collab‑Solver introduces a multi‑agent policy learning framework for mixed‑integer linear programming (MILP) that enables collaborative optimization of multiple solver modules. By modeling the interaction between cut selection and branching as a Stackelberg game, the approach employs a two‑phase learning paradigm—data‑communicated policy pretraining followed by coordinated policy refinement. Experiments on synthetic and large‑scale real‑world MILP datasets show that the jointly learned policies markedly improve solving performance and generalize well across diverse instance sets.
arXiv:2601.08696v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has mostly focused on learning policies, typically neural networks, that operate on a single candidat...
arXiv:2609.13396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective Bayesian optimisation (MOBO) is a sample-efficient approach for optimising expensive black-box functions with multiple objectives. In M...