OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution

Summary

OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution How do we teach machines to discover algorithms? Traditional approaches rely on hand-crafted heuristics, exhaustive search, or gradient-based optimization. But what if we could harness the creative potential of large language models (LLMs) within an evolutionary framework? OpenEvolve is an open-source evolutionary coding agent that integrates large language models into a quality-diversity search framework for algorithm discovery. Candidate programs are produced via LLM-guided edits (diff-based by default), evaluated with user-defined metrics, and organized using MAP-Elites while an island model with migration supports parallel, diversified exploration. The evaluation pipeline supports cascade staging and an artifact side-channel that feeds execution traces and errors back into subsequent prompts; optional LLM-based feedback can be incorporated into scoring. OpenEvolve has been applied across many domains—here are a few examples: systems optimization, scientific discovery, geospatial algorithms, scaling law discovery, GPU kernel optimization, prompt optimization, and more. Architecture Overview Figure 1: OpenEvolve architecture showing the five interconnected components of the evolution loop The Evolution Loop Prompt Sampler: Constructs context-rich prompts by selecting a parent program from the current island and curating evidence sets (top performers by fitness, lineage ancestors, diverse extremes across feature bins, and random samples). Prompts include the parent's code, evaluation metrics, feature coordinates for MAP-Elites, evolution history, and (optionally) execution artifacts. Template selection supports diff-based editing by default or full rewrites, with controlled stochasticity. LLM Ensemble: Generates candidate code using a weighted ensemble of OpenAI-compatible models (deterministic under seeds). In standard mode, a model is sampled by weight; in model-based islands, each island uses a f...