Synthesizing Feature Extractors: An Agentic Approach for Algorithm Selection

Hai Xia; Carlos Ansótegui; Stefan Szeider

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arXiv · 2608.17170

Synthesizing Feature Extractors: An Agentic Approach for Algorithm Selection

Hai Xia·Carlos Ansótegui·Stefan Szeider

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Abstract

Algorithm selection for constraint satisfaction problems requires extracting features that capture problem structure. Manually designing feature extractors demands deep domain expertise and quickly becomes a bottleneck when new problem classes appear. We present an automated approach that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) in an agentic check--fix--verify loop to synthesize executable Python scripts that act as interpretable, problem-specific feature extractors. Given a high-level MiniZinc model and an instance, the LLM agent generates code that constructs a typed graph representation and computes structural properties such as graph density, variable clustering, and constraint tightness. We evaluate our approach on three combinatorial problems (vehicle routing, car sequencing, fixed-length error-correcting codes) with a portfolio of five state-of-the-art solvers. The synthesized extractors yield algorithm selectors that consistently outperform both expert-curated mzn2feat features (up to $8.3$ percentage points (pp) test-set accuracy on FLECC) and the best transformer-based trans2feat variants. In the meanwhile, the synthesized feature extractors remain inspectable.

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BibTeX RIS

Hai Xia, Carlos Ansótegui, Stefan Szeider. 2026-08-17. Synthesizing Feature Extractors: An Agentic Approach for Algorithm Selection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17170

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