ShinkaEvolve: Towards Open-Ended And Sample-Efficient Program Evolution

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Main Authors: Lange, Robert Tjarko, Imajuku, Yuki, Cetin, Edoardo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lange, Robert Tjarko
Imajuku, Yuki
Cetin, Edoardo
author_facet Lange, Robert Tjarko
Imajuku, Yuki
Cetin, Edoardo
contents We introduce ShinkaEvolve: a new open-source framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) to advance scientific discovery with state-of-the-art performance and unprecedented efficiency. Recent advances in scaling inference time compute of LLMs have enabled significant progress in generalized scientific discovery. These approaches rely on evolutionary agentic harnesses that leverage LLMs as mutation operators to generate candidate solutions. However, current code evolution methods suffer from critical limitations: they are sample inefficient, requiring thousands of samples to identify effective solutions, and remain closed-source, hindering broad adoption and extension. ShinkaEvolve addresses these limitations, introducing three key innovations: a parent sampling technique balancing exploration and exploitation, code novelty rejection-sampling for efficient search space exploration, and a bandit-based LLM ensemble selection strategy. We evaluate ShinkaEvolve across diverse tasks, demonstrating consistent improvements in sample efficiency and solution quality. ShinkaEvolve discovers a new state-of-the-art circle packing solution using only 150 samples, designs high-performing agentic harnesses for AIME mathematical reasoning tasks, identifies improvements to ALE-Bench competitive programming solutions, and discovers novel mixture-of-expert load balancing loss functions that illuminate the space of optimization strategies. Our results demonstrate that ShinkaEvolve achieves broad applicability with exceptional sample efficiency. By providing open-source accessibility and cost-efficiency, this work democratizes open-ended discovery across diverse computational problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19349
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ShinkaEvolve: Towards Open-Ended And Sample-Efficient Program Evolution
Lange, Robert Tjarko
Imajuku, Yuki
Cetin, Edoardo
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
We introduce ShinkaEvolve: a new open-source framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) to advance scientific discovery with state-of-the-art performance and unprecedented efficiency. Recent advances in scaling inference time compute of LLMs have enabled significant progress in generalized scientific discovery. These approaches rely on evolutionary agentic harnesses that leverage LLMs as mutation operators to generate candidate solutions. However, current code evolution methods suffer from critical limitations: they are sample inefficient, requiring thousands of samples to identify effective solutions, and remain closed-source, hindering broad adoption and extension. ShinkaEvolve addresses these limitations, introducing three key innovations: a parent sampling technique balancing exploration and exploitation, code novelty rejection-sampling for efficient search space exploration, and a bandit-based LLM ensemble selection strategy. We evaluate ShinkaEvolve across diverse tasks, demonstrating consistent improvements in sample efficiency and solution quality. ShinkaEvolve discovers a new state-of-the-art circle packing solution using only 150 samples, designs high-performing agentic harnesses for AIME mathematical reasoning tasks, identifies improvements to ALE-Bench competitive programming solutions, and discovers novel mixture-of-expert load balancing loss functions that illuminate the space of optimization strategies. Our results demonstrate that ShinkaEvolve achieves broad applicability with exceptional sample efficiency. By providing open-source accessibility and cost-efficiency, this work democratizes open-ended discovery across diverse computational problems.
title ShinkaEvolve: Towards Open-Ended And Sample-Efficient Program Evolution
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19349