LLM-Guided Graph Generation for Structure-Based Local Improvement Methods

Abstract

Large neighborhood search normally selects a random subset of decision variables for iterative optimization. To efficiently solve various problems, researchers tend to design variable selection strategies that take into account structural features across different domains. In this paper, we build an automatic pipeline that is problem-agnostic to all problems in the MiniZinc format. By prompting an LLM with our semantic guidelines, we guide the LLM to produce a graph generator that maps any instance of a problem type to a uniform weighted graph, where nodes represent decision variables and edges represent constraint relationships. These problem-agnostic graphs guide our structure-based local improvement (SLIM) framework for variable selection. Meanwhile, the weighted graph enables all problem instances to share the same generic graph representation, from which the same graph features can be extracted and used for configuration selection. We evaluated our pipeline on instances across 20 MiniZinc competition problems, finding that algorithm selection achieves a 39.6% average problem-weighted win rate against a one-shot Gurobi baseline, more than doubling the best single configuration (19.3%). A post-hoc configuration and a feature ablation indicate a headroom of up to 44.0%, demonstrating that LLM-based semantic generation enables effective automated structure and feature extraction for constraint optimization.