SeaEvo: Advancing Algorithm Discovery with Strategy Space Evolution

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Luo, Sichun, Huang, Yi, Luo, Haochen, Liu, Fengyuan, Deng, Guanzhi, Li, Lei, Yao, Qinghua, Hu, Zefa, Feng, Junlan, Liu, Qi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Luo, Sichun
Huang, Yi
Luo, Haochen
Liu, Fengyuan
Deng, Guanzhi
Li, Lei
Yao, Qinghua
Hu, Zefa
Feng, Junlan
Liu, Qi
author_facet Luo, Sichun
Huang, Yi
Luo, Haochen
Liu, Fengyuan
Deng, Guanzhi
Li, Lei
Yao, Qinghua
Hu, Zefa
Feng, Junlan
Liu, Qi
contents Large Language Model (LLM)-guided evolutionary search is increasingly used for automated algorithm discovery, yet most current methods track search progress primarily through executable programs and scalar fitness. Even when natural-language reasoning is used through heuristic descriptions or reflection, it typically remains transient mutation context or unstructured memory, rather than organized as persistent population-level state over strategic directions. As a result, evolutionary search can struggle to distinguish syntactically different implementations of the same idea, preserve lower-fitness but strategically promising directions, or detect when an entire family of strategies has saturated. We introduce \model, a modular strategy-space layer that turns language-level strategic reasoning into first-class population-level evolutionary state in LLM-driven program search. \model represents each candidate program with an explicit natural-language strategy, clusters the archive by strategy semantics, retrieves behaviorally complementary inspirations, and periodically navigates the strategy landscape to avoid saturated directions. Without modifying the underlying evolutionary algorithms, \model improves existing evolutionary backbones across algorithm discovery, systems optimization, and agent-scaffold design tasks in most settings. Across four systems benchmarks, \model achieves a 20.6% average relative improvement, with the best single run on Prism scoring 3$\times$ higher. These results suggest that persistent strategy representations provide a practical mechanism for improving the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of LLM-guided evolutionary search, pointing toward compound AI systems whose search capabilities benefit from the structured accumulation and reuse of algorithmic strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24372
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SeaEvo: Advancing Algorithm Discovery with Strategy Space Evolution
Luo, Sichun
Huang, Yi
Luo, Haochen
Liu, Fengyuan
Deng, Guanzhi
Li, Lei
Yao, Qinghua
Hu, Zefa
Feng, Junlan
Liu, Qi
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Large Language Model (LLM)-guided evolutionary search is increasingly used for automated algorithm discovery, yet most current methods track search progress primarily through executable programs and scalar fitness. Even when natural-language reasoning is used through heuristic descriptions or reflection, it typically remains transient mutation context or unstructured memory, rather than organized as persistent population-level state over strategic directions. As a result, evolutionary search can struggle to distinguish syntactically different implementations of the same idea, preserve lower-fitness but strategically promising directions, or detect when an entire family of strategies has saturated. We introduce \model, a modular strategy-space layer that turns language-level strategic reasoning into first-class population-level evolutionary state in LLM-driven program search. \model represents each candidate program with an explicit natural-language strategy, clusters the archive by strategy semantics, retrieves behaviorally complementary inspirations, and periodically navigates the strategy landscape to avoid saturated directions. Without modifying the underlying evolutionary algorithms, \model improves existing evolutionary backbones across algorithm discovery, systems optimization, and agent-scaffold design tasks in most settings. Across four systems benchmarks, \model achieves a 20.6% average relative improvement, with the best single run on Prism scoring 3$\times$ higher. These results suggest that persistent strategy representations provide a practical mechanism for improving the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of LLM-guided evolutionary search, pointing toward compound AI systems whose search capabilities benefit from the structured accumulation and reuse of algorithmic strategies.
title SeaEvo: Advancing Algorithm Discovery with Strategy Space Evolution
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24372