arXiv subjects

Tran Cong Dao

Publications and source records attributed to Tran Cong Dao.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RELIC: Revealed Principles for Learning Interpretable Composable Skills in Multi-Agent Planning

Multi-agent planning becomes substantially harder when agents must improve specialized decision-making skills while keeping their executable implementations private. This setting arises when independently developed agents expose heterogeneous interfaces, observations, and capabilities, yet must coordinate under a shared team objective. Existing approaches commonly rely on centralized optimization, shared policy access, or common skill representations, assumptions that limit knowledge reuse when function signatures differ. We introduce RELIC, a framework for learning interpretable and composable programmatic skills through revealed principles. Each agent improves its own executable skill locally, while useful decision logic and coordination patterns are distilled into compact textual principles. Rather than requiring direct program exchange, these abstractions can be re-instantiated under agent-specific interfaces and reused across incompatible implementation spaces. A shared principle memory accumulates transferable knowledge and promotes abstractions that repeatedly improve team-level performance. This separation allows discoveries made by one agent to guide others while preserving local executable implementations and decentralized execution. RELIC therefore supports strategic transfer across both heterogeneous-role and shared-role cooperative teams. Extensive experiments across routing, scheduling, combinatorial optimization, and distributed coordination settings demonstrate RELIC's effectiveness against independent and joint LLM-based search methods, together with consistent benefits across task structures and LLM backbones.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SCOPE: Synthetic Conditional Objectives for Policy Evolution in Black-Box Combinatorial Optimization

Black-box combinatorial optimization requires systematically identifying high-quality solutions under a limited evaluation budget, yet the unknown objective function provides little guidance for deciding where the search should explore next. We introduce SCOPE, a general framework for Synthetic Conditional Objectives for Policy Evolution in Black-Box Combinatorial Optimization. Rather than directly optimizing the inaccessible objective, SCOPE learns a set of synthetic objectives conditioned on the accumulated search history, where each objective is designed to expose a distinct and potentially useful preference over candidate solutions. These objectives are then used to evolve search policies that generate diverse candidates, whose true quality is subsequently assessed through black-box evaluations. The outer loop adaptively updates and selects synthetic objectives according to how effectively their induced policies discover promising regions. In contrast, the inner loop returns a portfolio of top-performing policies to reduce the risk of relying on a single surrogate preference. This formulation reframes objective design as a mechanism for guiding policy exploration, enabling the search process to exploit observed evidence while maintaining structured diversity across discrete solution spaces. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark problems demonstrate that SCOPE consistently improves black-box search performance under limited evaluation budgets and generalizes well across diverse combinatorial structures.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Back to the Beginning of Heuristic Design: Bridging Code and Knowledge with LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced automatic heuristic design (AHD) for combinatorial optimization (CO), where candidate heuristics are iteratively proposed, evaluated, and refined. Most existing approaches search over executable programs and distill insights from execution feedback to guide later iterations. Because this process moves from low-level implementations to high-level principles, we refer to it as a bottom-up paradigm. We argue that this view is incomplete and introduce a complementary top-down perspective: knowledge becomes the primary search object and code merely instantiates and tests it, making what is learned explicit and reusable across problems and trajectories. We formalize this shift through a statistical-learning view that exposes a distortion--compression trade-off, and instantiate it in both population-based and tree-based AHD frameworks. Across CO and tasks beyond it, knowledge-first search improves discovery efficiency, transfer, and generalization, often outperforming code-centric pipelines, while combining both strategies yields further gains. Our results suggest that progress in AHD depends on iteratively constructing and evolving interpretable hypotheses that retain value beyond a single search trajectory.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

MOTIF: Multi-strategy Optimization via Turn-based Interactive Framework

Designing effective algorithmic components remains a fundamental obstacle in tackling NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems (COPs), where solvers often rely on carefully hand-crafted strategies. Despite recent advances in using large language models (LLMs) to synthesize high-quality components, most approaches restrict the search to a single element - commonly a heuristic scoring function - thus missing broader opportunities for innovation. In this paper, we introduce a broader formulation of solver design as a multi-strategy optimization problem, which seeks to jointly improve a set of interdependent components under a unified objective. To address this, we propose Multi-strategy Optimization via Turn-based Interactive Framework (MOTIF) - a novel framework based on Monte Carlo Tree Search that facilitates turn-based optimization between two LLM agents. At each turn, an agent improves one component by leveraging the history of both its own and its opponent's prior updates, promoting both competitive pressure and emergent cooperation. This structured interaction broadens the search landscape and encourages the discovery of diverse, high-performing solutions. Experiments across multiple COP domains show that MOTIF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the promise of turn-based, multi-agent prompting for fully automated solver design.

cs.AI↗