arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

MIRROR: A Multi-Agent Framework with Iterative Adaptive Revision and Hierarchical Retrieval for Optimization Modeling in Operations Research

arXiv:2602.03318v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Operations Research (OR) relies on expert-driven modeling--a slow and fragile process ill-suited to novel scenarios. While large language models (L...

By Yifan Shi, Jiayi Wang, Minyi Wu, Ye Fan, Jialong Shi, Jianyong Sun
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 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
arXiv AI
Sep 3

OptSkills: Learning Generalizable Optimization Skills from Problem Archetypes via Cluster-Based Distillation

OptSkills is an archetype‑centric agent that learns and reasons about optimization problems using large language models. It clusters problems by underlying archetypes, explores diverse modeling and solver configurations within each cluster, and distills successful trajectories into reusable workflow‑level skills. The system achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy on multiple datasets, outperforming prior methods on challenging benchmarks such as MIPLIB‑NL and OOD NLCO.

By Haochen Yang, Ke Zhao, Mengyuan Ma, Xingyu Lu, Xiangfeng Wang, Hong Qian
arXiv AI
Aug 5

IR2Solve: Structured Intermediate Representations for Cost-Efficient Optimization Autoformulation

arXiv:2608. 02641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can translate natural-language optimization problems into solver-ready formulations, but direct code generation is brittle: schema, indexing, and semantic errors can cause compilation failures, infeasible models, or incorrect objectives, while iterative repair, search, and multi-agent workflows increase inference cost.

By Penglin Zhu, Linhai Zhang, Jungang Xu, Xinchi Wei, Xiuqi Wu
arXiv AI
Jun 9

AlphaOPT: Formulating Optimization Programs with Self-Improving LLM Experience Library

arXiv:2510. 18428v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Optimization modeling underlies critical decision-making across industries, yet remains difficult to automate: natural-language problem descriptions must be translated into precise mathematical formulations and executable solver code.

By Minwei Kong, Ao Qu, Xiaotong Guo, Wenbin Ouyang, Chonghe Jiang, Han Zheng, Yining Ma, Dingyi Zhuang, Yuhan Tang, Junyi Li, Shenhao Wang, Haris Koutsopoulos, Hai Wang, Cathy Wu, Jinhua Zhao