Rethinking LLM-Driven Heuristic Design: Generating Efficient and Specialized Solvers via Dynamics-Aware Optimization

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced the field of Combinatorial Optimization through automated heuristic generation. Instead of relying on manual design, this LLM-Driven Heuristic Design (LHD) process leverages LLMs to iteratively generate and refine solvers to achieve high performance. However, existing LHD frameworks face two critical limitations: (1) Endpoint-only evaluation, which ranks solvers solely by final quality, ignoring the convergence process and runtime efficiency; (2) High adaptation costs, where distribution shifts necessitate re-adaptation to generate specialized solvers for new instance groups. To address these issues, we propose Dynamics-Aware Solver Heuristics (DASH), a framework that co-optimizes solver search mechanisms and runtime schedules guided by a convergence-aware metric, thereby identifying efficient and high-performance solvers. Furthermore, to mitigate expensive re-adaptation, DASH incorporates Profiled Library Retrieval (PLR). PLR efficiently archives specialized solvers concurrently with the evolutionary process, enabling cost-effective warm-starts for heterogeneous distributions. Experiments on four combinatorial optimization problems demonstrate that DASH improves runtime efficiency by over 3 times, while surpassing the solution quality of state-of-the-art baselines across diverse problem scales. Furthermore, by enabling profile-based warm starts, DASH maintains superior accuracy under different distributions while cutting LLM adaptation costs by over 90%.