{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/improving-llm-based-global-optimization-with","title":"Improving LLM-based Global Optimization with Search Space Partitioning","arxiv_id":"2505.21372","date":"2025-05-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Andrej Schwanke","Lyubomir Ivanov","David Salinas","Fabio Ferreira","Aaron Klein","Frank Hutter","Arber Zela"],"abstract":"Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as effective surrogate models and candidate generators within global optimization frameworks for expensive blackbox functions. Despite promising results, LLM-based methods often struggle in high-dimensional search spaces or when lacking domain-specific priors, leading to sparse or uninformative suggestions. To overcome these limitations, we propose HOLLM, a novel global optimization algorithm that enhances LLM-driven sampling by partitioning the search space into promising subregions. Each subregion acts as a ``meta-arm'' selected via a bandit-inspired scoring mechanism that effectively balances exploration and exploitation. Within each selected subregion, an LLM then proposes high-quality candidate points, without any explicit domain knowledge. Empirical evaluation on standard optimization benchmarks shows that HOLLM consistently matches or surpasses leading Bayesian optimization and trust-region methods, while substantially outperforming global LLM-based sampling strategies.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21372v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21372v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"improving-llm-based-global-optimization-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/automl/hollm","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"bayesian-optimization","task_name":"Bayesian Optimization"},{"task_slug":"global-optimization","task_name":"global-optimization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}