Automated Algorithm Discovery

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Overview

Automated algorithm discovery studies how to construct or improve executable procedures—such as heuristics, numerical solvers, learning rules, and hardware policies—without specifying every design choice by hand. Common approaches use evolutionary or tree search with language models to modify code, program synthesis over reusable components, reinforcement learning, or learned search controllers; candidates are assessed with benchmarks, simulators, formal checks, and staged evaluation. Persistent memory, modular representations, diversity archives, and adaptive budget allocation help reuse findings and reduce search stagnation. A central challenge is establishing that gains reflect sound, useful algorithms rather than benchmark overfitting, noisy evaluations, recombinations of human designs, or exploitable evaluators—and that they transfer under real-world constraints.

Latest papers

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170 papers33 papers in the last four weeks, up 120% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Latent Heuristic Search: Continuous Optimization for Automated Algorithm Design

    May 16, 2026Cheikh Ahmed, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh, Zirui ZhouSurrogate-Assisted OptimizationAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    Huawei Technologies Canada, Burnaby, Canada

  2. Effective Harness Engineering for Algorithm Discovery with Coding Agents

    May 13, 2026Yoichi Ishibashi, Taro Yano, Masafumi OyamadaReward HackingAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    NEC Corporation.

  3. CVEvolve: Autonomous Algorithm Discovery for Unstructured Scientific Data Processing

    May 12, 2026Ming Du, Xiangyu Yin, Yanqi Luo +4Automated Algorithm DiscoveryScientific Code Generation

    Advanced Photon Source Argonne National Laboratory Lemont, IL, USA

  4. GRAFT-ATHENA: Self-Improving Agentic Teams for Autonomous Discovery and Evolutionary Numerical Algorithms

    May 11, 2026Juan Diego Toscano, Zhaojie Chai, George Em KarniadakisAI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, 02912, RI, USA

  5. Budget-Efficient Automatic Algorithm Design via Code Graph

    May 11, 2026Maxime Bouscary, Manxi Wu, Saurabh AminAutomated Algorithm DiscoveryLarge Language Model-Guided Optimization

    Operations Research Center Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of California, Berkeley · Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  6. MLS-Bench: A Holistic and Rigorous Assessment of AI Systems on Building Better AI

    May 9, 2026Bohan Lyu, Yucheng Yang, Siqiao Huang +25AI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    UC Berkeley · Tsinghua University · Purdue University +6

  7. LLMs Improving LLMs: Agentic Discovery for Test-Time Scaling

    May 8, 2026Tong Zheng, Haolin Liu, Chengsong Huang +10LLM Inference EfficiencyAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    UMD · UVA · WUSTL +3

  8. Automated Large-scale CVRP Solver Design via LLM-assisted Flexible MCTS

    May 5, 2026Tong Guo, Caishun Chen, Yew Soon OngAutomated Algorithm DiscoveryLarge Language Model-Guided Optimization

    College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  9. OMEGA: Optimizing Machine Learning by Evaluating Generated Algorithms

    Apr 29, 2026Jeremy Nixon, Annika SinghAutomated Algorithm DiscoveryLLM-Based Program Synthesis

    Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute San Francisco, CA, USA · Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute & Computer Science, Stanford University Palo Alto, CA, USA

  10. SeaEvo: Advancing Algorithm Discovery with Strategy Space Evolution

    Apr 27, 2026Sichun Luo, Yi Huang, Haochen Luo +7Automated Algorithm DiscoveryEvolutionary Optimization

    1The University of Hong Kong · 2JIUTIAN Research, China Mobile · 3City University of Hong Kong

  11. A2DEPT: Large Language Model-Driven Automated Algorithm Design via Evolutionary Program Trees

    Apr 27, 2026Bin Chen, Shouliang Zhu, Beidan Liu +4Automated Algorithm DiscoveryAutomated Heuristic Design

    The Institute of Intelligent Computing, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China · College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China · Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing 100071, China

  12. EVIL: Evolving Interpretable Algorithms for Zero-Shot Inference on Event Sequences and Time Series with LLMs

    Apr 17, 2026David BerghausEvent Time PredictionTime Series Imputation

    Lamarr Institute · Fraunhofer IAIS

  13. The AI Telco Engineer: Toward Autonomous Discovery of Wireless Communications Algorithms

    Apr 11, 2026Fayçal Aït Aoudia, Jakob Hoydis, Sebastian Cammerer +3Automated Algorithm DiscoveryWireless Communications

    All authors are with NVIDIA.

  14. Large Language Models as Optimizers: A Survey of Direct vs. Tool-Augmented Approaches and Their Performance Frontiers

    Apr 9, 2026Roko Peran, Luka Hobor, Mihael Kovac +1Large Language Model-Guided OptimizationNatural Language to Optimization Modeling

    Student at University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia · University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia

  15. AI-Driven Research for Databases

    Apr 8, 2026Audrey Cheng, Harald Ng, Aaron Kabcenell +5Automated Algorithm DiscoveryLarge Language Model-Guided Optimization

    UC Berkeley · KTH Royal Institute of Technology · Meta +3

  16. ResearchEVO: An End-to-End Framework for Automated Scientific Discovery and Documentation

    Apr 7, 2026Zhe Zhao, Haibin Wen, Jiaming Ma +4AI-Assisted Scientific ResearchAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 999077, China

  17. AutoSOTA: An End-to-End Automated Research System for State-of-the-Art AI Model Discovery

    Apr 7, 2026Yu Li, Chenyang Shao, Xinyang Liu +13Autonomous ExperimentationAutonomous Research Agents

    Department of Electronic Engineering, BNRist, Tsinghua University · Zhongguancun Academy · Peking University +1

  18. InferenceEvolve: Towards Automated Causal Effect Estimators through Self-Evolving AI

    Apr 5, 2026Can Wang, Hongyu Zhao, Yiqun ChenCausal Effect EstimationAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    Department of Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA · Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

  19. CliffSearch: Structured Agentic Co-Evolution over Theory and Code for Scientific Algorithm Discovery

    Apr 1, 2026Youssef Mroueh, Carlos Fonseca, Brian Belgodere +1LLMs for Evolutionary OptimizationAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    IBM Research

  20. AlphaLab: Autonomous Multi-Agent Research Across Optimization Domains with Frontier LLMs

    Mar 31, 2026Brendan R. Hogan, Xiwen Chen, James T. Wilson +5Autonomous Research AgentsAutonomous Experimentation

    Morgan Stanley

  21. ASI-Evolve: AI Accelerates AI

    Mar 31, 2026Weixian Xu, Tiantian Mi, Yixiu Liu +6Autonomous Research AgentsAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    SJTU · SII · GAIR

  22. Evolutionary Discovery of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms via Large Language Models

    Mar 30, 2026Alkis Sygkounas, Amy Loutfi, Andreas PerssonAutomated Algorithm DiscoveryEvolutionary RL

    Machine Perception and Interaction Lab, Örebro University, Sweden

  23. Transferable knowledge graphs with executable learned operators for algorithm design

    Mar 30, 2026Camilo Chacón Sartori, José H. García, Andrei Voicu Tomut +1Knowledge GraphsAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), CSIC and BIST, Campus UAB, Bellaterra, 08193, Barcelona, Spain · Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), Bellaterra, Spain

  24. Automated near-term quantum algorithm discovery for molecular ground states

    Mar 27, 2026Fabian Finger, Frederic Rapp, Pranav Kalidindi +10Automated Algorithm DiscoveryQuantum Chemistry

    Quantinuum · Hiverge

  25. Claudini: Autoresearch Discovers State-of-the-Art Adversarial Attack Algorithms for LLMs

    Mar 25, 2026Alexander Panfilov, Peter Romov, Igor Shilov +3Adversarial Attacks on LLMsAdversarial Prompt Generation

    MATS · ELLIS Institute Tübingen & Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems · Tübingen AI Center +1

  26. From AI Assistant to AI Scientist: Autonomous Discovery of LLM-RL Algorithms with LLM Agents

    Mar 25, 2026Sirui Xia, Yikai Zhang, Aili Chen +3Automated Algorithm DiscoveryRL for Language Model Reasoning

    Shanghai Key Laboratory of Data Science, School of Computer Science, Fudan University · School of Data Science, Fudan University

  27. Bilevel Autoresearch: Meta-Autoresearching Itself

    Mar 24, 2026Yaonan Qu, Meng LuSelf-Improving AgentsAutonomous Research Agents

    Independent Researcher

  28. A Blueprint for Self-Evolving Coding Agents in Vehicle Aerodynamic Drag Prediction

    Mar 23, 2026Jinhui Ren, Huaiming Li, Yabin Liu +9Automotive AerodynamicsSurrogate Modeling

    Famou Agent Team, Baidu AI Cloud · IAT AI Team

  29. Early Discoveries of Algorithmist I: Promise of Provable Algorithm Synthesis at Scale

    Mar 23, 2026Janardhan KulkarniAutomated Algorithm DiscoveryProgram Synthesis

  30. DiscoGen: Procedural Generation of Algorithm Discovery Tasks in Machine Learning

    Mar 18, 2026Alexander D. Goldie, Zilin Wang, Adrian Hayler +17Automated Algorithm DiscoverySynthetic Benchmark Generation

    University of Oxford · University of California, Santa Barbara · University College London +1