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OptiHive: Ensemble Selection for LLM-Based Optimization via Statistical Modeling

Artificial Intelligence 2025-11-18 v2 Computation and Language

Abstract

LLM-based solvers have emerged as a promising means of automating problem modeling and solving. However, they remain unreliable and often depend on iterative repair loops that result in significant latency. We introduce OptiHive, a framework that enhances any solver-generation pipeline to produce higher-quality solvers from natural-language descriptions of optimization problems. OptiHive uses a single batched generation to produce diverse components (solvers, problem instances, and validation tests) and filters out erroneous components to ensure fully interpretable outputs. Accounting for the imperfection of the generated components, we employ a statistical model to infer their true performance, enabling principled uncertainty quantification and solver selection. On tasks ranging from traditional optimization problems to challenging variants of the Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem, OptiHive significantly outperforms baselines, increasing the optimality rate from 5% to 92% on the most complex problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.02503,
  title  = {OptiHive: Ensemble Selection for LLM-Based Optimization via Statistical Modeling},
  author = {Maxime Bouscary and Saurabh Amin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.02503},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:33:30.512Z