Mahdi Mostajabdaveh

Author directory

2026

Large language model (LLM)-driven evolutionary search is a powerful paradigm for automated program and algorithm discovery, yet existing systems are largely memoryless: each run explores from scratch, so agents repeatedly rediscover the same improvements and re-encounter the same dead ends. We introduce SEDIMA, a persistent hierarchical insight memory for evolutionary search agents. SEDIMA distills raw traces into natural-language insights, clusters them by semantic similarity using attention-weighted centroids, and retrieves relevant guidance to condition future mutations, accumulating transferable knowledge across runs and problems rather than within a single trajectory. As a drop-in module that leaves the search operators unmodified, SEDIMA improves average final performance by 5.5% on AlgoTune and 6.6% on ALE-Bench LITE under a fixed budget of 100 evaluated candidates. Under OpenEvolve, SEDIMA requires 32.3% fewer iterations on average to reach baseline-best performance across the five evaluated backbones.

2024

Math Word Problem (MWP) is a crucial NLP task aimed at providing solutions for given mathematical descriptions. A notable sub-category of MWP is the Linear Programming Word Problem (LPWP), which holds significant relevance in real-world decision-making and operations research. While the recent rise of generative large language models (LLMs) has brought more advanced solutions to LPWPs, existing evaluation methodologies for this task still diverge from human judgment and face challenges in recognizing mathematically equivalent answers. In this paper, we introduce a novel evaluation metric rooted in graph edit distance, featuring benefits such as permutation invariance and more accurate program equivalence identification. Human evaluations empirically validate the superior efficacy of our proposed metric when particularly assessing LLM-based solutions for LPWP.

2023

We demonstrate an interactive system to help operations research (OR) practitioners convert the mathematical formulation of optimization problems from TeX document format into the solver modeling language. In practice, a manual translation is cumbersome and time-consuming. Moreover, it requires an in-depth understanding of the problem description and a technical expertise to produce the modeling code. Thus, our proposed system TeX2Solver helps partially automate this conversion and help the users build optimization models more efficiently. In this paper, we describe its interface and the components of the hierarchical parsing system. A video demo walk-through is available online at http://bit.ly/3kuOm3x