用语言模型演化可执行代码,自动构建可直接使用的机器学习流水线。
Evolving Executable Pipeline Programs for AutoML with Language Models

- 以Python代码形式搜索完整流水线,语言模型生成新程序变体。
- 在68个OpenML任务上超越auto-sklearn和H2O,接近AutoGluon性能。
- 结果为可读可改的原始代码,支持自定义扩展,无需修改框架。
自动化机器学习(AutoML)系统在预定义的预处理算子、学习器和超参数空间中搜索流水线:它们只能选择和调优已有组件,无法生成该空间外的结构。我们提出LACE,一种全新的基于代码的表格型流水线AutoML框架。该框架通过进化循环维护一组兼容scikit-learn的Python类,并由大语言模型充当变异操作符。据我们所知,LACE是首个以这种方式构建通用表格型流水线AutoML的系统,在标准化OpenML任务上进行了评估,采用防泄露协议,生成器不获知数据集身份。由于每个候选方案均为普通Python代码,返回的流水线及其搜索过程均可直接检查与编辑,而非仅通过框架对象。在68个OpenML分类任务上,使用GPT-5.4-mini的LACE显著优于auto-sklearn和H2O,与最强的搜索系统AutoGluon表现相当,且覆盖全部基准测试。更先进的表格基础模型在支持的任务子集上更准确,但仅返回固定预训练预测器,无法提供可编辑的任务特定程序。因此,LACE的贡献不在于极致精度,而在于以代码定义的搜索空间:全面覆盖、可直接复用的流水线,以及通过修改提示词即可扩展的组件集。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Automated machine learning (AutoML) systems search for pipelines within a space of preprocessing operators, learners, and hyper-parameters specified in advance: they can select and tune known components, but cannot produce structure outside that space. We present LACE, an AutoML framework that instead searches over complete executable pipeline programs: an evolutionary loop maintains a population of scikit-learn-compatible Python classes, and a large language model acts as the variation operator. To our knowledge, LACE is the first to formulate general tabular pipeline AutoML this way, evaluated on standardized OpenML tasks under a leakage-controlled protocol that withholds dataset identity from the generator. Because every candidate is ordinary Python, the returned pipeline and the search that produced it can be inspected and edited directly, rather than only through a framework's model objects. On 68 OpenML classification tasks, LACE with GPT-5.4-mini significantly outperforms auto-sklearn, H2O, and a fixed XGBoost baseline, with no detectable difference against AutoGluon, the strongest search-based system evaluated, while covering the full benchmark. Newer tabular foundation models are more accurate on the subset of tasks they support, but apply a fixed pretrained predictor rather than returning an editable task-specific program. LACE's contribution is therefore not raw accuracy but a search space defined by code: complete coverage, pipelines practitioners can reuse directly, and a component set extended by editing the prompt rather than the framework.
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