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Going Beyond AlphaEvolve in Agent Scientific Discovery (arxiv.org)
1 point by kyuksel 289 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Instead of editing one program at a time, this keeps candidates in one graph where each step offers several options and every path is a program. Scoring each option across its paths guided edits and gave steadier gains than the usual one-candidate overwrite approach.

Abstract · EvoLattice: Persistent Internal-Population Evolution through Multi-Alternative Quality-Diversity Graph Representations for LLM-Guided Program Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to evolve programs and multi-agent systems, yet most existing approaches rely on overwrite-based mutations that maintain only a single candidate at a time. Such methods discard useful variants, suffer from destructive edits, and explore a brittle search space prone to structural failure. We introduce EvoLattice, a framework that represents an entire population of candidate programs or agent behaviors within a single directed acyclic graph. Each node stores multiple persistent alternatives, and every valid path through the graph defines a distinct executable candidate, yielding a large combinatorial search space without duplicating structure. EvoLattice enables fine-grained alternative-level evaluation by scoring each alternative across all paths in which it appears, producing statistics that reveal how local design choices affect global performance. These statistics provide a dense, data-driven feedback signal for LLM-guided mutation, recombination, and pruning, while preserving successful components. Structural correctness is guaranteed by a deterministic self-repair mechanism that enforces acyclicity and dependency consistency independently of the LLM. EvoLattice naturally extends to agent evolution by interpreting alternatives as prompt fragments or sub-agent behaviors. Across program synthesis (proxy and optimizer meta-learning), EvoLattice yields more stable evolution, greater expressivity, and stronger improvement trajectories than prior LLM-guided methods. The resulting dynamics resemble quality-diversity optimization, emerging implicitly from EvoLattice's internal multi-alternative representation rather than an explicit external archive.

Kamer Ali Yuksel
arXiv:2512.13857 · cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.MA, cs.NE · submitted Dec 15, 2025 · updated Dec 17, 2025
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Google DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve made a key insight clear: hashtag#AgenticAI can act as a team of evolutionary scientists, proposing meaningful algorithm changes inside an evaluation loop. AlphaEvolve and similar methods also share a fundamental limitation. Each mutation overwrites the structure. Earlier variants become inert. Partial improvements cannot be recombined. Credit assignment is global and coarse. Over long horizons, evolution becomes fragile. I introduce EvoLattice, which removes this limitation by changing the unit of evolution itself. Instead of evolving a single program, EvoLattice evolves an internal population encoded inside one structure. A program (or agent) is represented as a DAG where each node contains multiple persistent alternatives. Every valid path through the graph is executable. Evolution becomes additive, non-destructive, and combinatorial — not overwrite-based. We evaluate EvoLattice on NAS-Bench-Suite-Zero, under identical compute and evaluation settings. EvoLattice outperforms AlphaEvolve, achieves higher rank correlation, exhibits lower variance and faster stabilization, and improves monotonically without regression. We further validate generality on training-free optimizer update rule discovery, where EvoLattice autonomously discovers a nonlinear sign–curvature optimizer that significantly outperforms SGD, SignSGD, Lion, and tuned hybrids — using the same primitives and no training.

Why this matters? Persistent internal diversity: AlphaEvolve preserves diversity across generations. EvoLattice preserves it inside the program. Strong components never disappear unless explicitly pruned. Fine-grained credit assignment: Each micro-operator is evaluated across all contexts in which it appears, producing statistics (mean, variance, best-case). AlphaEvolve only sees a single scalar score per program. Quality–Diversity (QD) without archives: EvoLattice naturally exhibits MAP-Elites-style dynamics: monotonic improvement of elites, widening gap between best and average, bounded variance — without external archives or novelty objectives. Structural robustness: AlphaEvolve relies on the hashtag#LLM to preserve graph correctness. EvoLattice applies deterministic self-repair after every mutation, removing structural fragility from the loop.

AlphaEvolve shows how hashtag#LLMs can mutate programs. EvoLattice shows what they should evolve: the internal computational fabric, not entire programs. This turns LLM-guided evolution from a fragile rewrite process into a stable, cumulative, QD-driven discovery system. The same framework applies to prompt and agentic workflow evolution. As agent systems grow deeper and more interconnected, overwrite-based evolution breaks down. EvoLattice’s internal population and self-repair make long-horizon agentic evolution feasible and interpretable.