FrugalEvo introduces a cost‑aware evolutionary framework that pairs a high‑cost, powerful LLM with a cheaper LLM to explore and refine program solutions, respectively. It incorporates a cache‑efficient evolution process that maximizes prefix reuse across steps and defines a Budget‑Aware Area Under the Curve (BA‑AUC) metric to evaluate solution quality within a fixed cost budget. Across ten mathematical and systems optimization tasks, FrugalEvo matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art baselines in final solution quality and achieves higher BA‑AUC on nine tasks, while delivering new state‑of‑the‑art performance on circle packing for costs as low as $0.55 to $1.68.
arXiv:2605. 25246v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for optimization modeling and solver-code generation, yet practical operations research and optimization problems often require a harder capability: designing scalable algorithms that exploit problem structure and outperform direct formulation-and-solve baselines.
The paper introduces AgenticBBO-Bench, a cross‑domain benchmark for evaluating large language model agents on black‑box optimization tasks such as synthetic functions, hyperparameter tuning, database tuning, chip design, and molecular design. Experiments show that agentic BBO outperforms direct LLM‑based methods in all five domains and beats the best numerical optimizers in four. The study also analyzes the impact of optimization tools, task semantics, prior knowledge, and the LLM’s role, finding that numerical tools are not consistently helpful, task semantics are broadly useful, and numerical optimizers can capitalize on agent‑generated search trajectories.
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. 24647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven autonomous research (AR) systems are becoming increasingly effective across a broad range of tasks.
arXiv:2607. 08791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Designing effective multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) algorithms requires balancing many interdependent design choices whose optimal configuration is problem-dependent and typically demands deep expertise.
The paper introduces Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses (RRSI), a method that applies regularization principles to the iterative editing of an LLM agent’s harness—prompts, control flow, tooling, memory, and context management. RRSI limits the number of edits per candidate, encourages novel trajectories, and uses a critic and pruner to filter out benchmark‑specific or ineffective changes, thereby favoring reusable agent mechanisms. Experiments on eight benchmarks show RRSI improves performance by up to 14.1 points on the training split and 4.7 points on out‑of‑distribution tests, while reducing policy token usage by 30% compared to unregularized evolution.
The paper introduces LLM-EBG, an evolutionary framework that uses a large language model as a generative operator to automatically create optimization benchmarks. By generating unconstrained single-objective continuous minimization problems expressed as mathematical formulas, the framework can produce benchmarks that consistently favor a target algorithm over a comparison algorithm in over 80% of trials. Landscape analysis shows that these generated problems exhibit distinct geometric traits, such as sensitivity to variable scaling, reflecting the search behaviors of different optimization methods.
arXiv:2606. 25207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) is essential for maximizing machine learning model performance, and its core challenge is sample efficiency: finding strong configurations within a limited budget.
The paper introduces a self‑evolving harness framework where a frozen language‑model agent first solves tasks and then edits its own harness based on run records. Using a 49‑line seed harness, the evolved harness improves average scores on in‑distribution benchmarks by 4.48 points and on out‑of‑distribution benchmarks by 12.64 points, surpassing Codex on the former and matching it on the latter. Continued evolution on a specific out‑of‑distribution benchmark further raises performance, and the study analyzes emergent mechanisms such as output truncation and history compaction.
arXiv:2608. 08189v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-driven program discovery relies on rapid evaluator feedback, but many scientific and engineering tasks require high-fidelity simulations, hardware execution, or physical experiments, making each evaluation expensive.
arXiv:2609.36303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in agentic heuristic design use AI agents and execution feedback to automate algorithm discovery for challenging optimization problem...
arXiv:2602. 10233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-guided evolutionary computation, most notably AlphaEvolve, has been remarkably successful in discovering novel mathematical constructions by solving challenging optimization problems.