HSEvo: Elevating Automatic Heuristic Design with Diversity-Driven Harmony Search and Genetic Algorithm Using LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dat, Pham Vu Tuan, Doan, Long, Binh, Huynh Thi Thanh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916533944451072
author Dat, Pham Vu Tuan
Doan, Long
Binh, Huynh Thi Thanh
author_facet Dat, Pham Vu Tuan
Doan, Long
Binh, Huynh Thi Thanh
contents Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) is an active research area due to its utility in solving complex search and NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems in the real world. The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce new possibilities by coupling LLMs with evolutionary computation to automatically generate heuristics, known as LLM-based Evolutionary Program Search (LLM-EPS). While previous LLM-EPS studies obtained great performance on various tasks, there is still a gap in understanding the properties of heuristic search spaces and achieving a balance between exploration and exploitation, which is a critical factor in large heuristic search spaces. In this study, we address this gap by proposing two diversity measurement metrics and perform an analysis on previous LLM-EPS approaches, including FunSearch, EoH, and ReEvo. Results on black-box AHD problems reveal that while EoH demonstrates higher diversity than FunSearch and ReEvo, its objective score is unstable. Conversely, ReEvo's reflection mechanism yields good objective scores but fails to optimize diversity effectively. With this finding in mind, we introduce HSEvo, an adaptive LLM-EPS framework that maintains a balance between diversity and convergence with a harmony search algorithm. Through experimentation, we find that HSEvo achieved high diversity indices and good objective scores while remaining cost-effective. These results underscore the importance of balancing exploration and exploitation and understanding heuristic search spaces in designing frameworks in LLM-EPS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_14995
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HSEvo: Elevating Automatic Heuristic Design with Diversity-Driven Harmony Search and Genetic Algorithm Using LLMs
Dat, Pham Vu Tuan
Doan, Long
Binh, Huynh Thi Thanh
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Artificial Intelligence
Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) is an active research area due to its utility in solving complex search and NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems in the real world. The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce new possibilities by coupling LLMs with evolutionary computation to automatically generate heuristics, known as LLM-based Evolutionary Program Search (LLM-EPS). While previous LLM-EPS studies obtained great performance on various tasks, there is still a gap in understanding the properties of heuristic search spaces and achieving a balance between exploration and exploitation, which is a critical factor in large heuristic search spaces. In this study, we address this gap by proposing two diversity measurement metrics and perform an analysis on previous LLM-EPS approaches, including FunSearch, EoH, and ReEvo. Results on black-box AHD problems reveal that while EoH demonstrates higher diversity than FunSearch and ReEvo, its objective score is unstable. Conversely, ReEvo's reflection mechanism yields good objective scores but fails to optimize diversity effectively. With this finding in mind, we introduce HSEvo, an adaptive LLM-EPS framework that maintains a balance between diversity and convergence with a harmony search algorithm. Through experimentation, we find that HSEvo achieved high diversity indices and good objective scores while remaining cost-effective. These results underscore the importance of balancing exploration and exploitation and understanding heuristic search spaces in designing frameworks in LLM-EPS.
title HSEvo: Elevating Automatic Heuristic Design with Diversity-Driven Harmony Search and Genetic Algorithm Using LLMs
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14995