Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: While Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) shows promise in Large Language Model (LLM) based Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD), it suffers from a critical over-exploitation tendency under the limited computational budgets required for heuristic evaluation. To address this limitation, we propose Clade-AHD, an efficient framework that replaces node-level point estimates with clade-level Bayesian beliefs. By aggregating descendant evaluations into Beta distributions and performing Thompson Sampling over these beliefs, Clade-AHD explicitly models uncertainty to guide exploration, enabling more reliable decision-making under sparse and noisy evaluations. Extensive experiments on complex combinatorial optimization problems demonstrate that Clade-AHD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods while significantly reducing computational cost. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Mriya0306/Clade-AHD.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Lai, Kezhao, Lai, Yutao, Liu, Hai-Lin
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7127289063
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