SMCEvolve: Principled Scientific Discovery via Sequential Monte Carlo Evolution
Authors: Jiachen Jiang, Huminhao Zhu, Zhihui Zhu
Summary
arXiv:2605. 15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-driven program evolution has emerged as a powerful tool for automated scientific discovery, yet existing frameworks offer no principled guide for designing their individual components and provide no guarantee that the search converges.
Relevance
Read next because SMCEvolve: Principled Scientific Discovery via Sequential Monte Carlo Evolution overlaps with clean result "LoRA persona trained on alone emits at 23.5% when a co-trained partner learns ..., vs 0% control on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Leakage rate is a usable signal for recovering trigger-shaped phrases on Gaperon-1125-1B without knowing the hidden trigger itself (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)". Matching terms: code, under, control. Source: arxiv cs.AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Threat model
Potential threat/caveat for clean result "LoRA persona trained on alone emits at 23.5% when a co-trained partner learns ..., vs 0% control on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (MODERATE confidence)": this item discusses benchmark.
Abstract
arXiv:2605.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-driven program evolution has emerged as a powerful tool for automated scientific discovery, yet existing frameworks offer no principled guide for designing their individual components and provide no guarantee that the search converges. We introduce SMCEvolve, which recasts program search as sampling from a reward-tilted target distribution and approximates it with a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler. From this view, three core mechanisms emerge as principled components: adaptive parent resampling, mixture of mutation with acceptance, and automatic convergence control. We further provide a finite-sample complexity analysis that bounds the LLM-call budget required to reach a target approximation error. Across math, algorithm efficiency, symbolic regression, and end-to-end ML research benchmarks, SMCEvolve surpasses state-of-the-art evolving systems while using fewer LLM calls under self-determined termination. The code is available at https://github.com/kongwanbianjinyu/SMCEvolve.