Ye Fan

Mingen Kuang, Xudong Deng, Xi Lin et al.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in Automated Heuristic Design (AHD), existing methods typically generate and evolve heuristics as a single operator or search strategy, limiting their ability to model strong coupling among multiple decision substructures in problems such as the Traveling Thief Problem (TTP) and the Traveling Purchaser Problem (TPP). In this work, we propose CoEvo-AHD, an LLM-driven dual-population co-evolutionary framework for automated heuristic design in coupled combinatorial optimization. Unlike prior methods that evolve individual heuristics in isolation, CoEvo-AHD leverages LLMs to co-evolve two closely related operator populations. A cooperative evaluation mechanism explicitly captures interactions between route and selection operators, while pairwise scoring and synergistic joint crossover help discover complementary operator logic for joint improvement across coupled decision subspaces. We further design a tool-invocation environment library that encapsulates frequently used core operations, such as local-search delta computation, into callable functions, enabling LLM-generated operators to use standardized interfaces instead of reimplementing inefficient and error-prone problem-specific loops. Experiments on TTP and TPP show that CoEvo-AHD automatically discovers cooperative heuristic combinations and achieves competitive solution quality against traditional heuristics.

Wei Wang, Jialong Shi, Jianyong Sun et al.

The hardness of the Unconstrained Binary Quadratic Program (UBQP) problem is due its rugged landscape. Various algorithms have been proposed for UBQP, including the Landscape Smoothing Iterated Local Search (LSILS). Different from other UBQP algorithms, LSILS tries to smooth the rugged landscape by building a convex combination of the original UBQP and a toy UBQP. In this paper, our study further investigates the impact of smoothing rugged landscapes using different toy UBQP problems, including a toy UBQP with matrix ^Q1 (construct by "+/-1"), a toy UBQP with matrix ^Q2 (construct by "+/-i") and a toy UBQP with matrix ^Q3 (construct randomly). We first assess the landscape flatness of the three toy UBQPs. Subsequently, we test the efficiency of LSILS with different toy UBQPs. Results reveal that the toy UBQP with ^Q1 (construct by "+/-1") exhibits the flattest landscape among the three, while the toy UBQP with ^Q3 (construct randomly) presents the most non-flat landscape. Notably, LSILS using the toy UBQP with ^Q2 (construct by "+/-i") emerges as the most effective, while ^Q3 (construct randomly) has the poorest result. These findings contribute to a detailed understanding of landscape smoothing techniques in optimizing UBQP.

Yifan Shi, Jialong Shi, Jiayi Wang et al.

Operations Research (OR) relies on expert-driven modeling-a slow and fragile process ill-suited to novel scenarios. While large language models (LLMs) can automatically translate natural language into optimization models, existing approaches either rely on costly post-training or employ multi-agent frameworks, yet most still lack reliable collaborative error correction and task-specific retrieval, often leading to incorrect outputs. We propose MIRROR, a fine-tuning-free, end-to-end multi-agent framework that directly translates natural language optimization problems into mathematical models and solver code. MIRROR integrates two core mechanisms: (1) execution-driven iterative adaptive revision for automatic error correction, and (2) hierarchical retrieval to fetch relevant modeling and coding exemplars from a carefully curated exemplar library. Experiments show that MIRROR outperforms existing methods on standard OR benchmarks, with notable results on complex industrial datasets such as IndustryOR and Mamo-ComplexLP. By combining precise external knowledge infusion with systematic error correction, MIRROR provides non-expert users with an efficient and reliable OR modeling solution, overcoming the fundamental limitations of general-purpose LLMs in expert optimization tasks.

Chentong Chen, Mengyuan Zhong, Ye Fan et al.

Although Large Language Models have advanced Automated Heuristic Design, treating algorithm evolution as a monolithic text generation task overlooks the coupling between discrete algorithmic structures and continuous numerical parameters. Consequently, existing methods often discard promising algorithms due to uncalibrated constants and suffer from premature convergence resulting from simple similarity metrics. To address these limitations, we propose TIDE, a Tuning-Integrated Dynamic Evolution framework designed to decouple structural reasoning from parameter optimization. TIDE features a nested architecture where an outer parallel island model utilizes Tree Similarity Edit Distance to drive structural diversity, while an inner loop integrates LLM-based logic generation with a differential mutation operator for parameter tuning. Additionally, a UCB-based scheduler dynamically prioritizes high-yield prompt strategies to optimize resource allocation. Extensive experiments across nine combinatorial optimization problems demonstrate that TIDE discovers heuristics that significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines in solution quality while achieving improved search efficiency and reduced computational costs.

Chentong Chen, Mengyuan Zhong, Jianyong Sun et al.

LLM-based Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) within Evolutionary Computation (EC) frameworks has shown promising results. However, its effectiveness is hindered by the use of static operators and the lack of knowledge accumulation mechanisms. We introduce HiFo-Prompt, a framework that guides LLMs with two synergistic prompting strategies: Foresight and Hindsight. Foresight-based prompts adaptively steer the search based on population dynamics, managing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. In addition, hindsight-based prompts mimic human expertise by distilling successful heuristics from past generations into fundamental, reusable design principles. This dual mechanism transforms transient discoveries into a persistent knowledge base, enabling the LLM to learn from its own experience. Empirical results demonstrate that HiFo-Prompt significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based AHD methods, generating higher-quality heuristics while achieving substantially faster convergence and superior query efficiency.

Xudong Li, Ye Fan, Rugui Yao et al.

Driven by B5G and 6G technologies, multi-network fusion is an indispensable tendency for future communications. In this paper, we focus on and analyze the \emph{security performance} (SP) of the \emph{satellite-terrestrial downlink transmission} (STDT). Here, the STDT is composed of a satellite network and a vehicular network with a legitimate mobile receiver and an mobile eavesdropper distributing. To theoretically analyze the SP of this system from the perspective of mobile terminals better, the random geometry theory is adopted, which assumes that both terrestrial vehicles are distributed stochastically in one beam of the satellite. Furthermore, based on this theory, the closed-form analytical expressions for two crucial and specific indicators in the STDT are derived, respectively, the secrecy outage probability and the ergodic secrecy capacity. Additionally, several related variables restricting the SP of the STDT are discussed, and specific schemes are presented to enhance the SP. Then, the asymptotic property is investigated in the high signal-to-noise ratio scenario, and accurate and asymptotic closed-form expressions are given. Finally, simulation results show that, under the precondition of guaranteeing the reliability of the STDT, the asymptotic solutions outperform the corresponding accurate results significantly in the effectiveness.

Ping Zhou, Zhen Yu, Jingyi Ma et al.

Distributed statistical inference has recently attracted immense attention. The asymptotic efficiency of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), the one-step MLE, and the aggregated estimating equation estimator are established for generalized linear models under the "large $n$, diverging $p_n$" framework, where the dimension of the covariates $p_n$ grows to infinity at a polynomial rate $o(n^α)$ for some $0<α<1$. Then a novel method is proposed to obtain an asymptotically efficient estimator for large-scale distributed data by two rounds of communication. In this novel method, the assumption on the number of servers is more relaxed and thus practical for real-world applications. Simulations and a case study demonstrate the satisfactory finite-sample performance of the proposed estimators.