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.
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.
The paper introduces Online Hyperparameter Optimization (OHPO), framing it as an infinitely many‑armed bandit problem over mixed and conditional search spaces. It proposes the IMABO framework, which couples any bandit policy with any oracle for proposing new configurations, and presents IMOSS—a restart‑free anytime policy with provable regret bounds. Experiments show that IMABO, combined with practical oracles such as TPE, an incumbent‑mutation oracle, and a pretrained tabular foundation model, outperforms random search across a range of settings from classical ML models to LLM‑based agents.
arXiv:2607. 29241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing modern recommender models still depends heavily on engineers manually iterating over architectural, objective, and training-strategy changes.
arXiv:2608. 10694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evolutionary optimization of LLM prompts and agentic programs (e.
COBRA‑Skills is a new framework that treats skill optimization for large language model agents as a budgeted sequential problem over a dynamically evolving candidate set. It uses contextual‑bandit prioritization to focus evaluations on promising or informative candidates and refines the skill population based on execution feedback. In experiments across six agent benchmarks and three target models, COBRA‑Skills outperforms existing methods, cuts optimization cost by 55–58 % compared to SkillOpt, and requires only 50 unique optimization examples per benchmark.
CANOPY is a multi‑fidelity tree bandit algorithm that learns where a piecewise‑smooth prior holds instead of assuming global smoothness. It uses cheap random‑path probes to certify local aggregation bias and then focuses expensive leaf evaluations on cells where smoothness is violated. The method achieves provable fixed‑budget and regret guarantees that scale with the number of discontinuities, matching smooth‑tree rates when no violations exist and approaching structure‑blind search when violations are dense.
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:2610.18354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Game-theoretic benchmarks claim that large language model (LLM) strategic decision-making varies across game types, interaction structures, and capabil...
EvoAlloc is a self‑evolving resource‑allocation agent designed to improve LLM‑based program evolution by learning from past search and allocation outcomes. It revises its allocation strategy over time and uses counterfactual exploration to evaluate candidates that were previously denied resources, thereby enriching its experience. In coding and agent‑harness optimization benchmarks, EvoAlloc reduces full evaluations by 59‑82% and total LLM tokens by 61‑89%, while achieving 8.7‑12.0% higher final performance under the same evaluation budget.
arXiv:2606. 29082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Would experience designing faster GPU kernels also help close in on a long-standing open mathematical conjecture?
arXiv:2609.37447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How strong can an AlphaZero-style chess system become under limited training compute when its entire learning loop is engineered for efficiency? We t...