arXiv:2603.27415cs.AIstat.CO2026-03

用大模型替代随机搜索,发现贪心算法已是强默认方案。

Greedy Is a Strong Default: Agents as Iterative Optimizers

  • 用大模型生成候选解,而非随机扰动
  • 贪心爬升在四类任务中表现最优,效率高出2-3倍
  • 结果可解释,如癌症分类规则复现医学原理

传统优化算法通过随机扰动生成候选解。本文用大模型代理替代随机生成器,基于评估诊断推理提出有根据的候选解,探究当提议者不再随机时,经典优化机制是否仍有效。在四个跨离散、混合与连续空间的任务上进行验证(均重复3次):乳腺癌规则分类测试准确率86.0%至96.5%;MobileNetV3-Small在STL-10上的混合超参优化准确率84.5%至85.8%,零灾难性失败,优于随机搜索的60%;Qwen2.5-0.5B在SST-2上的LoRA微调达到89.5%至92.7%,效率为Optuna TPE的2倍;XGBoost在Adult Census上AUC达0.9297至0.9317,与CMA-ES持平,但仅需1/3评估次数。实证显示,在该设定下,模拟退火、并行调查员甚至第二个大模型(OpenAI Codex)均未超越贪心爬升,且需更多评估。大模型学习到的先验足够强,接受规则复杂度影响有限——第一轮即贡献主要提升,各策略收敛至相似配置。实际意义是:贪心爬升加早停即为强默认策略。此外,框架产出人类可读结果,如癌症分类规则独立复现了既定细胞病理学原则。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Classical optimization algorithms--hill climbing, simulated annealing, population-based methods--generate candidate solutions via random perturbations. We replace the random proposal generator with an LLM agent that reasons about evaluation diagnostics to propose informed candidates, and ask: does the classical optimization machinery still help when the proposer is no longer random? We evaluate on four tasks spanning discrete, mixed, and continuous search spaces (all replicated across 3 independent runs): rule-based classification on Breast Cancer (test accuracy 86.0% to 96.5%), mixed hyperparameter optimization for MobileNetV3-Small on STL-10 (84.5% to 85.8%, zero catastrophic failures vs. 60% for random search), LoRA fine-tuning of Qwen2.5-0.5B on SST-2 (89.5% to 92.7%, matching Optuna TPE with 2x efficiency), and XGBoost on Adult Census (AUC 0.9297 to 0.9317, tying CMA-ES with 3x fewer evaluations). Empirically, on these tasks: a cross-task ablation shows that simulated annealing, parallel investigators, and even a second LLM model (OpenAI Codex) provide no benefit over greedy hill climbing while requiring 2-3x more evaluations. In our setting, the LLM's learned prior appears strong enough that acceptance-rule sophistication has limited impact--round 1 alone delivers the majority of improvement, and variants converge to similar configurations across strategies. The practical implication is surprising simplicity: greedy hill climbing with early stopping is a strong default. Beyond accuracy, the framework produces human-interpretable artifacts--the discovered cancer classification rules independently recapitulate established cytopathology principles.

优化大模型贪心可解释

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