optimize_anything: A Universal API for Optimizing any Text Parameter
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:optimize_anything: A Universal API for Optimizing any Text Parameter
Abstract:Can a single LLM-based optimization system match specialized tools across fundamentally different domains? We show that when optimization problems are formulated as improving a text artifact evaluated by a scoring function, a single AI-based optimization system-supporting single-task search, multi-task search with cross-problem transfer, and generalization to unseen inputs-achieves state-of-the-art results across six diverse tasks. Our system discovers agent architectures that nearly triple Gemini Flash's ARC-AGI accuracy (32.5% to 89.5%), finds scheduling algorithms that cut cloud costs by 40%, generates CUDA kernels where 87% match or beat PyTorch, and outperforms AlphaEvolve's reported circle packing solution (n=26). Ablations across three domains reveal that actionable side information yields faster convergence and substantially higher final scores than score-only feedback, and that multi-task search outperforms independent optimization given equivalent per-problem budget through cross-task transfer, with benefits scaling with the number of related tasks. Together, we show for the first time that text optimization with LLM-based search is a general-purpose problem-solving paradigm, unifying tasks traditionally requiring domain-specific algorithms under a single framework. We open-source optimize\_anything with support for multiple backends as part of the GEPA project at this https URL .
| Comments: | 16 pages, 11 figures; Blog: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE); Software Engineering (cs.SE) |
| MSC classes: | 68T05, 68T07, 68T20, 68T50, 68W50, 90C26, 90C59, 52C15 |
| ACM classes: | I.2.6; I.2.7; I.2.8; I.2.11; D.1.2; D.2.2; G.1.6; F.2.2 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.19633 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.19633v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19633
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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| Journal reference: | Proceedings of the ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems (CAIS 26), May 26-29, 2026, San Jose, CA, USA |
| Related DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1145/3786335.3813167
DOI(s) linking to related resources
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Submission history
From: Lakshya A Agrawal [view email][v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 10:18:12 UTC (3,492 KB)
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