arXiv AI

A Closer Look at Agentic BBO: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Black-Box Optimization

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.

arXiv AI
Oct 7

Agentic Design Space Exploration for Joint Hardware Configuration Selection and Mapping of AI Inference Workloads on Heterogeneous Edge SoCs

The paper introduces TraceDSE, an agentic design space exploration framework for jointly mapping AI inference workloads to heterogeneous edge SoCs and configuring each processing unit. Unlike traditional black-box optimization, TraceDSE uses a proposer‑critic loop powered by large language models and enriched with system execution traces to identify bottlenecks and refine design choices. Experiments on an Intel Meteor Lake SoC show that TraceDSE outperforms state‑of‑the‑art evolutionary and Bayesian methods, improving Pareto frontier hypervolume by up to 68% while reducing hardware evaluations by 6–9×.

By Geetha Prasuna Yarramneni, Surya Selvam, Wilfried Haensch, Anand Raghunathan
arXiv AI
Jun 2

FrontierOR: Benchmarking LLMs' Capacity for Efficient Algorithm Design in Large-Scale Optimization

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.

By Minwei Kong, Chonghe Jiang, Ao Qu, Wenbin Ouyang, Zhaoming Zeng, Xiaotong Guo, Zhekai Li, Junyi Li, Yi Fan, Xinshou Zheng, Xi Jing, Yikai Zhang, Zhiwei Liang, Seonghoo Kim, Runqing Yang, Zijian Zhou, Sirui Li, Han Zheng, Wangyang Ying, Ou Zheng, Chonghuan Wang, Jinglong Zhao, Hanzhang Qin, Cathy Wu, Paul Pu Liang, Jinhua Zhao, Hai Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

ASAP: Agent-System Co-Design for Wall-Clock-Centered Auto HPO Research for ML Experiments

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.

By Taicheng Guo, Haomin Zhuang, Kehan Guo, Yujun Zhou, Nitesh V. Chawla, Olaf Wiest, Xiangliang Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Agentic ESOpt: Fine-Tuning Long-Horizon LLM Agents with Minimal GPU Requirements

Agentic ESOpt proposes using evolution strategies (ES) instead of reinforcement learning to fine‑tune large language‑model agents for long‑horizon tasks. ES offers model scalability, flexibility, and better long‑horizon credit assignment, enabling full‑parameter optimization with minimal GPU memory. The framework samples parameter perturbations, evaluates agents with rewards, and updates online, achieving notable performance gains on WebArena‑Lite and in test‑time prompt‑parameter co‑evolution.

By Zhi Zheng, Rongsheng Chen, Yunpeng Ba, Zhenkun Wang, Yee Whye Teh, Wee Sun Lee
arXiv AI
2d ago

Hyper Algorithm Design Agent: Evolving Learnable Optimizer from Zero

The paper introduces a dual‑agent framework that automates the evolution of Meta‑Black‑Box Optimization (MetaBBO) algorithms. By treating the design loop as a coding task, a task agent refines the MetaBBO codebase while a hyper agent continually modifies both agents, enabling recursive self‑improvement. The resulting evolved MetaBBO variants outperform current human‑crafted baselines and adapt quickly across different optimization domains, revealing emergent design principles.

By Zipei Yu, Yue-Jiao Gong, Zeyuan Ma, Yuncheng Jiang, Zhiguang Cao
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Right Answers, Costly Models: The Efficiency Gap in LLM-based Optimization Modeling

The paper introduces OptTips, a knowledge base of 50 expert optimization modeling techniques, and OptDachshund, a multi‑agent framework that generates mathematical models and solver code from natural‑language problem descriptions. Using these tools, the authors create the EfficientOpt benchmark, comprising 561 expert‑reviewed tasks with paired reference implementations, to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on both correctness and computational efficiency. Their experiments with 11 LLMs show a consistent efficiency gap: even when LLMs produce correct solutions, the resulting programs often take longer to solve than expert‑crafted counterparts, highlighting the need to assess both accuracy and runtime performance in LLM‑based optimization modeling.

By Zhong Li, Xin Huang, Jinhui Wan, Xiangyi Wang, Shenkai Zhang, Ruiqi Chen, Wenyu Liu, Zaiwen Wen, Ziyan Luo
arXiv AI
Oct 5

FrugalEvo: Towards Cost-Aware LLM-Guided Program Evolution

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.

By Hui Chen, Xuan Qi, James Xu Zhao, Zhaopeng Feng, Shilong Liu, Kuang Xu, Pang Wei Koh, Bryan Hooi
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Evolving Excellence: Automated Optimization of LLM-based Agents

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