LACE makes LLM-designed optimization heuristics work across new problems
LACE gives LLMs a structured way to build and refine optimization heuristics, making automated algorithm design more usable across unfamiliar decision problems. It separates the problem contract, tools, and heuristic portfolio, then evolves specialist heuristics within a fixed runtime budget instead of asking for one complete solution. Across 36 benchmark problems, it scored 0.945 versus 0.870 for the strongest existing LLM method and 0.571 for direct prompting; on four new problem types, it reached 0.97–0.99.