让AI同时设计专用算法和挑战题,自动发现并补足弱点。
MOSAIC: Adversarial Co-evolution of Specialist Heuristics and Problem Instances for LLM-based Automated Heuristic Design

- 用对抗进化法同步优化难题和算法,基于问题结构分区管理。
- 生成的难题覆盖更广,能有效区分不同算法优劣,提升性能。
- 适合研究自动化算法设计、强化学习与复杂优化问题的人看。
基于大语言模型(LLM)的自动化启发式设计(AHD)已在组合优化问题(COPs)中取得显著成果。然而,现有方法仅在小规模固定数据集上优化平均性能,并依赖“语义梯度”从标量反馈中提炼改进方向。单一启发式无法跨实例分布占优,且标量反馈仅告知是否改进,不说明在何处或为何改进。本文提出MOSAIC,一种基于网格的框架,通过质量-多样性(QD)归档,在结构特征空间中对抗性地协同演化问题实例与专家级启发式。实例进化以暴露当前启发式的弱点,而启发式则通过针对性适应新暴露区域来消除这些弱点。每个归档单元保存一个专家启发式、代表性实例及解释其有效性的洞察,形成持续积累的经验记忆。针对来自远距离网格区域的启发式对,采用LLM引导的进化循环生成判别性实例,并利用决策树识别各启发式占优的特征空间区域。反射型LLM对比两启发式,生成多维度洞察并持久保留于对应区域,指导交叉与变异。该归档既是共演化出的判别性实例基准,也是区域专家启发式池,贪婪选择从中提取紧凑互补的组合方案。在多种COP、测试规模与LLM架构下,该组合方案始终优于当前最优的基于LLM的AHD方法;共演化实例在特征空间覆盖率和启发式区分能力上也超越传统进化生成基线。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Automated heuristic design (AHD) with large language models (LLMs) has produced strong heuristics for combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). Yet existing frameworks optimize for average performance on a small fixed dataset and steer the search with "verbal gradients" distilled from scalar better/worse feedback. No single heuristic dominates across instance distributions, and scalar feedback tells the LLM whether a heuristic improved, but not where in the instance space or why. We propose MOSAIC, a grid-based framework that adversarially co-evolves problem instances and specialist heuristics inside a Quality-Diversity (QD) archive indexed by structural instance features. Instances evolve to expose weaknesses of the current heuristics, and heuristics evolve to eliminate them by specializing to the newly exposed regions. Each archive cell keeps a specialist heuristic, representative instances, and insights explaining what works in its region, forming a persistent memory that accumulates over the evolutionary search. For each heuristic pair sampled from distant grid regions, an LLM-guided evolutionary loop generates discriminative instances, and a decision tree identifies the feature-space regions where each heuristic wins. A reflection LLM then contrasts the two heuristics to produce multi-directional insights that persist in those regions and guide crossover and mutation. The archive is simultaneously a co-evolved benchmark of discriminative instances and a pool of region specialist heuristics, from which greedy selection extracts a compact complementary portfolio. Across COPs, test sizes, and LLM backbones, the portfolio consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based AHD methods, and the co-evolved instances attain higher feature-space coverage and stronger heuristic discrimination than evolutionary instance-generation baselines.
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