Ruodai Cui
Author directory2026
CVaR-RMD: CVaR Selection Pressure for Robust Metaheuristic Discovery
Ruodai Cui | Li Niu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Ruodai Cui | Li Niu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models have recently been used to discover heuristics through iterative program search, offering a promising approach to automated algorithm design. However, candidates selected by average performance may degrade across instance families, random seeds, and problem scales because mean-based objectives can obscure rare but severe failures. We propose CVaR-RMD, a risk-sensitive evolutionary framework that uses an LLM to mutate executable heuristic programs and ranks candidates by empirical conditional value-at-risk over heterogeneous evaluation conditions. Across three combinatorial optimization domains, CVaR-based selection improves upper-tail performance and reduces failure rates while maintaining competitive mean performance. These gains persist on larger unseen instances and independently curated within-domain benchmarks. Code is available https://github.com/BeyondHeaven/CVaR-RMD.