Breaking Validity-Induced Boundaries to Expand Algorithm Search Space: A Two-Stage AST-Based Operator for LLM-Driven Automated Heuristic Evolution

arXiv:2604.16420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) based automated heuristic design (AHD) has shown great potential in discovering efficient heuristics. Most existing LLM-AHD frameworks use semantic evolutionary operators that rely entirely on the LLM's pre-trained knowledge. These one-stage methods strictly require the generated code to be valid during the operation and often rely on a ``thought-code'' representation. We argue that this end-to-end generation fundamenta