Program evolution can measure whether a mutation helped, but it rarely controls how far the mutation moves in behavior space. Syntactic edit size is an unreliable proxy: a small code change can alter nearly every action, while a larger rewrite can preserve the same execution trace.
arXiv:2609.37371v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Model adaptation is typically governed by a fixed recipe, even though different update programs can produce substantially different behavioral outcom...
By Rebecca Ramnauth, Brian Scassellati
arXiv:2609.08435v2 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In persistent interactions, long contexts may encode an evolving process rather than a fixed record: later events can revise or revoke earlier informat...
By Ziliang Zhao, Zenan Xu, Shuting Wang, Zhao Wang, Bowen Cao, Minda Hu, Lincheng Li, Pluto Zhou, Zhicheng Dou
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.
By Sichun Luo, Yi Huang, Guanzhi Deng, Haibo Wang, Haochen Luo, Lei Li, Zefa Hu, Junlan Feng, Qi Liu
The paper demonstrates that large language models can generate executable procedural content generators, enabling direct search over generator programs rather than individual levels. Using Sokoban, Zelda, Dangerous Dave, and Lode Runner, the authors evolve complete Python generators via language‑model mutation and crossover, and introduce Continual Abstraction Discovery (CAD) to extract reusable primitives into a run‑specific helper module. Experiments show that CAD consistently improves mean final best fitness across all domain and API comparisons, with learned libraries being adopted by subsequent programs and repeatedly rediscovering useful utilities.
By Matthew Siper, Ahmed Khalifa, Julian Togelius
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.
MAPLE is a new agent that maintains and updates optimization problems through successive natural‑language requests, combining language‑based problem construction with mathematical programming and evolutionary search. It preserves the optimization program, accepted plans, earlier updates, and candidate solutions for future requests, enabling rapid adaptation to changing business constraints. In a benchmark of 15 trajectories and 180 updates across various operational domains, MAPLE completed all trajectories with high online scalar quality and Pareto hypervolume ratio, and maintained update validity and useful search information across substantial revisions.
By Kesheng Chen, Yamin Hu, Wenjian Luo
arXiv:2607. 28947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to solve complex problems by searching over program space, offering a general paradigm for scientific problems that can be naturally represented and solved as programs.
By Jingwen Fu, Zhen Liu, Yuhan Liu, He Zhang, Nanning Zheng
The paper introduces ARTEMIS, a no-code evolutionary optimization platform that automatically tunes large language model (LLM) agents by jointly optimizing prompts, tool descriptions, and parameters using semantically-aware genetic operators. Starting from a benchmark script and natural language goals, ARTEMIS discovers configurable components, extracts performance signals from execution logs, and evolves configurations without architectural changes. Experiments on four agent systems show significant gains: a 13.6% increase in acceptance rate for the ALE Agent, a 10.1% performance boost for the Mini‑SWE Agent, a 36.9% token‑reduction for the CrewAI Agent, and a 22% accuracy improvement for the MathTales‑Teacher Agent using a smaller open‑source model.
By Paul Brookes, Vardan Voskanyan, Rafail Giavrimis, Matthew Truscott, Mina Ilieva, Chrystalla Pavlou, Alexandru Staicu, Manal Adham, Will Evers- Hood, Jingzhi Gong, Kejia Zhang, Matvey Fedoseev, Vishal Sharma, Roman Bauer, Zheng Wang, Hema Nair, Wei Jie, Tianhua Xu, Aurora Constantin, Leslie Kanthan, Michail Basios
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. A natural alternative is to combine cheap and strong models under a fixed inference budget.
arXiv:2606. 01286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid progress of frontier large language models has led to widespread benchmark saturation, limiting the ability of existing datasets to differentiate model capabilities or provide useful training signal.
By Yangzhen Wu, Aaron J. Li, Wenjie Ma, Li Cao, Ziheng Zhou, Mert Cemri, Shu Liu, Yuran Xiu, Chenxiao Yan, Haikun Zhao, Bin Yu, Ion Stoica, Dawn Song
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...
By Yutao Lai, Kezhao Lai, Hai-Lin Liu, Yuping Wang, Ping Guo