optimize_anything: Unified Text Optimization can Outperform Specialized Systems

Lakshya A Agrawal, Donghyun Lee, Shangyin Tan, Wenjie Ma, Karim Elmaaroufi, Rohit Sandadi, Sanjit A. Seshia, Koushik Sen, Dan Klein, Ion Stoica, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Omar Khattab, Alex Dimakis, Matei Zaharia

Keywords: LLM-based optimization, text artifact optimization, code generation, agent architecture search, evolutionary search, Pareto optimization

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\% → 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.

Submission Number: 110