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:2604.04940v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Designing effective heuristics for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems remains challenging and often requires substantial domain expertise....
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.
arXiv:2606. 02438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned heuristics have recently become a competitive alternative to traditional domain-independent heuristics for satisficing planning.
arXiv:2501. 18784v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heuristics are a central component of deterministic planning, particularly in domain-independent settings where general applicability is prioritized over task-specific tuning.
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).
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:2605. 29649v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heuristic search is the dominant paradigm in symbolic AI planning, and the strongest heuristics are the result of decades of work by planning researchers.
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.
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.
Recent systems for optimizing prompts, programs, and ML workflows typically rely on explicit outer-loop controllers such as evolutionary search, bandits, or textual-gradient methods. We ask a fundamentally different question: how much of this search policy can be internalized by a single tool-using agent?
arXiv:2608. 06714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent systems for optimizing prompts, programs, and ML workflows typically rely on explicit outer-loop controllers such as evolutionary search, bandits, or textual-gradient methods.
arXiv:2606. 00618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for AI planning, yet their performance remains constrained by the training data distribution.