Evolutionary Optimization

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Overview

Evolutionary optimization studies how populations of candidate solutions can improve through selection, mutation, recombination, and other forms of variation, especially when gradients are unavailable or objectives are expensive. Common approaches include genetic algorithms, differential evolution, CMA-ES and evolution strategies, as well as multi-objective methods that preserve trade-offs and diversity. Researchers apply them to engineering design, robotics, scheduling, scientific discovery, and increasingly to evolving code, prompts, and language-model behavior; newer methods add learned surrogates, adaptive resource allocation, and large-language-model-generated operators. A central challenge is balancing exploration, solution quality, and evaluation cost, while ensuring improvements generalize beyond the benchmarks and search budgets used to find them.

Latest papers

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295 papers33 papers in the last four weeks, up 50% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. EvoX: Meta-Evolution for Automated Discovery

    Feb 26, 2026Shu Liu, Shubham Agarwal, Monishwaran Maheswaran +14Evolutionary OptimizationLLMs for Evolutionary Optimization

    UC Berkeley · Stanford University · Bespoke Labs

  2. Duel-Evolve: Reward-Free Test-Time Scaling via LLM Self-Preferences

    Feb 25, 2026Sweta Karlekar, Carolina Zheng, Magnus Saebo +5Large Language Model-Guided OptimizationTest-Time Scaling

    Columbia University · Los Alamos National Laboratory

  3. Code World Models for Parameter Control in Evolutionary Algorithms

    Feb 25, 2026Camilo Chacón Sartori, Guillem Rodríguez CorominasCode World ModelsLarge Language Model-Guided Optimization

    ICN2 – Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Barcelona, Spain · Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain · Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain

  4. AdaEvolve: Adaptive LLM Driven Zeroth-Order Optimization

    Feb 23, 2026Mert Cemri, Shubham Agrawal, Akshat Gupta +9Large Language Model-Guided OptimizationLLMs for Evolutionary Optimization

    University of California, Berkeley · Bespoke Labs

  5. All Constant Mutation Rates for the (1+1)(1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm

    Feb 22, 2026Andrew James KelleyFitness Landscape AnalysisEvolutionary Optimization

  6. RankEvolve: Automating the Discovery of Retrieval Algorithms via LLM-Driven Evolution

    Feb 18, 2026Jinming Nian, Fangchen Li, Dae Hoon Park +1Information RetrievalAutomated Algorithm Discovery

    Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA · Independent Researcher, Bothell, WA, USA · Walmart Global Tech, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

  7. MadEvolve: Evolutionary Optimization of Cosmological Algorithms with Large Language Models

    Feb 17, 2026Tianyi Li, Shihui Zang, Moritz MünchmeyerAutomated Algorithm DiscoveryScientific Code Generation

    Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  8. DexEvolve: Evolutionary Optimization for Robust and Diverse Dexterous Grasp Synthesis

    Feb 16, 2026René Zurbrügg, Andrei Cramariuc, Marco HutterRobotic GraspingDexterous Manipulation

    ETH Zürich

  9. Evolutionary System Prompt Learning for Reinforcement Learning in LLMs

    Feb 16, 2026Lunjun Zhang, Ryan Chen, Bradly C. StadieLanguage Model Self-ImprovementRL for Language Models

    Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto · Department of Statistics and Data Science, Northwestern University · Bridgewater AIA Labs

  10. NeuroWeaver: An Autonomous Evolutionary Agent for Exploring the Programmatic Space of EEG Analysis Pipelines

    Feb 13, 2026Guoan Wang, Shihao Yang, Feng LiuEvolutionary OptimizationEEG Decoding

    Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 96 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA

  11. ImprovEvolve: Basin-Hopping Meets LLM-Guided Evolutionary Search

    Feb 10, 2026Alexey Kravatskiy, Valentin Khrulkov, Ivan OseledetsLarge Language Model-Guided Scientific DiscoveryEvolutionary Optimization

    1MIRIAI, Russia · 2FusionBrain Lab, Russia · 3AXXX, Russia +1

  12. Organisms Write Their Own Evolution: Direct Epigenomic Inheritance Accelerates Learning on Compositional Tasks

    Feb 1, 2026Nam H. LeEvolutionary Optimization

    Department of Computer Science University of Vermont

  13. Online Regime-aware Calibration for Black-box Social Simulators via Posterior-assisted Evolutionary Dynamic Optimization

    Jan 27, 2026Peng Yang, Zhenhua Yang, Boquan Jiang +3Evolutionary OptimizationBlack-Box Optimization

    Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain-Inspired Intelligent Computation, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China · Department of Statistics and Data Science, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China +2

  14. An Evolutionary Framework for Automatic Optimization Benchmark Generation via Large Language Models

    Jan 19, 2026Yuhiro Ono, Tomohiro Harada, Yukiya MiuraEvolutionary OptimizationBenchmark Design

    Graduate School of Systems Design, Tokyo Metropolitan University, 6-6, Asahigaoka, Hino, 1910065, Tokyo, Japan. · Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University, 2552026 Shimo-okubo, Sakura-ku, Saitama, 3388570, Saitama, Japan.

  15. PACEvolve: Enabling Progress-Aware Consistent Evolution

    Jan 15, 2026Minghao Yan, Bo Peng, Benjamin Coleman +13Evolutionary OptimizationLarge Language Model-Guided Optimization

    University of Wisconsin–Madison · Google · Google DeepMind +1

  16. Decoupling Constraints from Two Directions for Evolutionary Constrained Multi-objective Optimization

    Dec 30, 2025Ruiqing Sun, Dawei Feng, Xing Zhou +6Evolutionary OptimizationMulti-Objective Evolutionary Optimization

    College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410000, P.R. China · College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410000, P.R. China · State Key Laboratory of Complex & Critical Software Environment, College of Information and Communication, National University of Defense Technology, Wuhan 430019, P.R. China +1

  17. PepEVOLVE: Position-Aware Dynamic Peptide Optimization via Group-Relative Advantage

    Nov 21, 2025Trieu Nguyen, Hao-Wei Pang, Shasha FengMolecular OptimizationDrug Discovery

    Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA · University of South Florida, FL, USA

  18. Evolution Strategies at Scale: LLM Fine-Tuning Beyond Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 29, 2025Xin Qiu, Yulu Gan, Conor F. Hayes +6Fine-TuningEvolutionary Optimization

    Cognizant AI Lab, San Francisco, CA, USA · Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA · University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA +1

  19. A Systematic Survey on Large Language Models for Evolutionary Optimization: From Modeling to Solving

    Sep 10, 2025Yisong Zhang, Ran Cheng, Guoxing Yi +1Evolutionary OptimizationLarge Language Model-Guided Optimization

  20. ESSA: Evolutionary Strategies for Scalable Alignment

    Jul 6, 2025Daria Korotyshova, Boris Shaposhnikov, Alexey Malakhov +7LLM AlignmentEvolutionary Optimization

    T-Tech · Yandex

  21. Tuning without Peeking: Provable Generalization Bounds and Robust LLM Post-Training

    Jul 2, 2025Ismail Labiad, Mathurin Videau, Matthieu Kowalski +4Privacy-Preserving Language ModelsEvolutionary Optimization

    Meta FAIR · Université Paris-Saclay · LISN, Inria, CNRS +2

  22. Consensus-based optimization for closed-box adversarial attacks and a connection to evolution strategies

    Jun 30, 2025Tim Roith, Leon Bungert, Philipp WackerEvolutionary OptimizationBlack-Box Adversarial Attacks

    TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology and Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany · Institute of Mathematics, Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (CAIDAS), University of Würzburg, Emil-Fischer-Str. 40, 97074 Würzburg, Germany · School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury

  23. Decomposability-Guided Cooperative Coevolution for Large-Scale Itinerary Planning

    Jun 6, 2025Ziyu Zhang, Peilan Xu, Yuetong Sun +2Travel PlanningTraveling Salesperson Problem

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China. · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China. · School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen 518055, Guangdong, China. +1

  24. (θl,θuθ_l, θ_u)-Parametric Multi-Task Optimization: Joint Search in Solution and Infinite Task Spaces

    Mar 11, 2025Tingyang Wei, Jiao Liu, Abhishek Gupta +2Evolutionary OptimizationMulti-Task Optimization

    College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · School of Mechanical Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Goa, India · Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore +1

  25. Small Molecule Optimization with Large Language Models

    Jul 26, 2024Philipp Guevorguian, Menua Bedrosian, Tigran Fahradyan +3Molecular OptimizationEvolutionary Optimization

    YerevaNN research lab, Yerevan, Armenia.