Experience-Driven Reflective Co-Evolution of Prompts and Heuristics for Autonomous Algorithm Design (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Combinatorial optimization has long been dominated by manually engineered heuristics, which require substantial expert intuition and implementation overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that couples an island migration model with elite selection to maintain population diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior accuracy on the Traveling Salesman and Bin Packing Problems. |
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
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Heuristic-based Search Algorithm in Automatic Instruction-focused Prompt Optimization: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to remarkable achievements across a variety of NLP tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in NLP have been driven by the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt optimization methods have found effective prompts, but they often differ from sophisticated prompts carefully designed by human experts. |
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GenDLN: Evolutionary Algorithm-Based Stacked LLM Framework for Joint Prompt Optimization (2025.acl-srw)
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Self-Supervised Prompt Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jinyu Xiang, Jiayi Zhang, Zhaoyang Yu, Xinbing Liang, Fengwei Teng, Jinhao Tu, Fashen Ren, Xiangru Tang, Sirui Hong, Chenglin Wu, Yuyu Luo
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PromISe: Releasing the Capabilities of LLMs with Prompt Introspective Search (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for large language models use uniform manual prompts, resulting in underestimation of performance. |
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Reflection in the Dark: Exposing and Escaping the Black Box in Reflective Prompt Optimization (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Automatic prompt optimization (APO) is a powerful paradigm for improving LLM performance without manual prompt engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples hypothesis generation from prompt rewriting . they propose VISTA framework that recovers accuracy to 87.57% on same defective seed . |
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