ReVEL: Multi-Turn Reflective LLM-Guided Heuristic Evolution via Structured Performance Feedback

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 5 Mar 2026] ReVEL: Multi-Turn Reflective LLM-Guided Heuristic Evolution via Structured Performance Feedback Cuong Van Duc, Minh Nguyen Dinh Tuan, Tam Vu Duc, Tung Vu Duy, Son Nguyen Van, Hanh Nguyen Thi, Binh Huynh Thi Thanh Designing effective heuristics for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems remains a challenging and expertise-intensive task. Existing applications of large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on one-shot code synthesis, yielding brittle heuristics that underutilize the models' capacity for iterative reasoning. We propose ReVEL: Multi-Turn Reflective LLM-Guided Heuristic Evolution via Structured Performance Feedback, a hybrid framework that embeds LLMs as interactive, multi-turn reasoners within an evolutionary algorithm (EA). The core of ReVEL lies in two mechanisms: (i) performance-profile grouping, which clusters candidate heuristics into behaviorally coherent groups to provide compact and informative feedback to the LLM; and (ii) multi-turn, feedback-driven reflection, through which the LLM analyzes group-level behaviors and generates targeted heuristic refinements. These refinements are selectively integrated and validated by an EA-based meta-controller that adaptively balances exploration and exploitation. Experiments on standard combinatorial optimization benchmarks show that ReVEL consistently produces heuristics that are more robust and diverse, achieving statistically significant improvements over strong baselines. Our results highlight multi-turn reasoning with structured grouping as a principled paradigm for automated heuristic design. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.04940 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.04940v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.04940 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Cuong Van Duc [view email] [v1] Thu, 5 Mar 2026 04:52:11 UTC (8,221 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)