Rethinking LLM-Driven Heuristic Design: Generating Efficient and Specialized Solvers via Dynamics-Aware Optimization

arXiv:2601.20868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced the field of Combinatorial Optimization through automated heuristic generation. Instead of relying on manual design, this LLM-Driven Heuristic Design (LHD) process leverages LLMs to iteratively generate and refine solvers to achieve high performance. However, existing LHD frameworks face two critical limitations: (1) Endpoint-only evaluation, which ranks solvers solely by final gap to a reference