Automatic Design of Optimization Test Problems with Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Achtelik, Wojciech, Guzowski, Hubert, Smołka, Maciej, Mańdziuk, Jacek
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Achtelik, Wojciech
Guzowski, Hubert
Smołka, Maciej
Mańdziuk, Jacek
author_facet Achtelik, Wojciech
Guzowski, Hubert
Smołka, Maciej
Mańdziuk, Jacek
contents The development of black-box optimization algorithms depends on the availability of benchmark suites that are both diverse and representative of real-world problem landscapes. Widely used collections such as BBOB and CEC remain dominated by hand-crafted synthetic functions and provide limited coverage of the high-dimensional space of Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) features, which in turn biases evaluation and hinders training of meta-black-box optimizers. We introduce Evolution of Test Functions (EoTF), a framework that automatically generates continuous optimization test functions whose landscapes match a specified target ELA feature vector. EoTF adapts LLM-driven evolutionary search, originally proposed for heuristic discovery, to evolve interpretable, self-contained numpy implementations of objective functions by minimizing the distance between sampled ELA features of generated candidates and a target profile. In experiments on 24 noiseless BBOB functions and a contamination-mitigating suite of 24 MA-BBOB hybrid functions, EoTF reliably produces non-trivial functions with closely matching ELA characteristics and preserves optimizer performance rankings under fixed evaluation budgets, supporting their validity as surrogate benchmarks. While a baseline neural-network-based generator achieves higher accuracy in 2D, EoTF substantially outperforms it in 3D and exhibits stable solution quality as dimensionality increases, highlighting favorable scalability. Overall, EoTF offers a practical route to scalable, portable, and interpretable benchmark generation targeted to desired landscape properties.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automatic Design of Optimization Test Problems with Large Language Models
Achtelik, Wojciech
Guzowski, Hubert
Smołka, Maciej
Mańdziuk, Jacek
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
The development of black-box optimization algorithms depends on the availability of benchmark suites that are both diverse and representative of real-world problem landscapes. Widely used collections such as BBOB and CEC remain dominated by hand-crafted synthetic functions and provide limited coverage of the high-dimensional space of Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) features, which in turn biases evaluation and hinders training of meta-black-box optimizers. We introduce Evolution of Test Functions (EoTF), a framework that automatically generates continuous optimization test functions whose landscapes match a specified target ELA feature vector. EoTF adapts LLM-driven evolutionary search, originally proposed for heuristic discovery, to evolve interpretable, self-contained numpy implementations of objective functions by minimizing the distance between sampled ELA features of generated candidates and a target profile. In experiments on 24 noiseless BBOB functions and a contamination-mitigating suite of 24 MA-BBOB hybrid functions, EoTF reliably produces non-trivial functions with closely matching ELA characteristics and preserves optimizer performance rankings under fixed evaluation budgets, supporting their validity as surrogate benchmarks. While a baseline neural-network-based generator achieves higher accuracy in 2D, EoTF substantially outperforms it in 3D and exhibits stable solution quality as dimensionality increases, highlighting favorable scalability. Overall, EoTF offers a practical route to scalable, portable, and interpretable benchmark generation targeted to desired landscape properties.
title Automatic Design of Optimization Test Problems with Large Language Models
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02724