mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Autonomous Code Evolution Meets NP-Completeness

arXiv 2509.07367 ↗First posted 9 Sep 2025cs.AI cs.LG cs.LOcited by 14

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong coding abilities, enabling not only static code generation but also iterative code self-evolving through agentic frameworks. Recently, AlphaEvolve citenovikov2025alphaevolve demonstrated that LLM-based coding agents can autonomously improve algorithms and surpass human experts, with scopes limited to isolated kernels spanning hundreds of lines of code. Inspired by AlphaEvolve, we present SATLUTION, the first framework to extend LLM-based code evolution to the full repository scale, encompassing hundreds of files and tens of thousands of lines of C/C++ code. Targeting Boolean Satisfiability (SAT), the canonical NP-complete problem and a cornerstone of both theory and applications. SATLUTION orchestrates LLM agents to directly evolve solver repositories under strict correctness guarantees and distributed runtime feedback, while simultaneously self-evolving its own evolution policies and rules. Starting from SAT Competition 2024 codebases and benchmark, SATLUTION evolved solvers that decisively outperformed the human-designed winners of the SAT Competition 2025, and also surpassed both 2024 and 2025 champions on the 2024 benchmarks.

Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 9 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2025.

Builds on

9 of 29 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery16 Jun

Other references · 8

  1. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  2. 2024LLM-SR: Scientific Equation Discovery via Programming with Large Language Modelscited by 117
  3. 2024Symbolic Regression with a Learned Concept Librarycited by 76
  4. 2023AI-assisted coding: Experiments with GPT-4cited by 43
  5. 2025HeuriGym: An Agentic Benchmark for LLM-Crafted Heuristics in Combinatorial Optimizationcited by 19
  6. 2022DeepSAT: An EDA-Driven Learning Framework for SATcited by 11
  7. 2018Clause Vivification by Unit Propagation in CDCL SAT Solverscited by 6
  8. 2025Discovering heuristics in a complex SAT solver with large language modelscited by 3

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 14.

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  1. 2026Simple Baselines are Competitive with Code Evolution
  2. 2025CodeEvolve: an open source evolutionary coding agent for algorithmic discovery and optimization
  3. 2026EvoCodeBench: A Human-Performance Benchmark for Self-Evolving LLM-Driven Coding Systems
  4. 2026What Do Evolutionary Coding Agents Evolve?
  5. 2025ShinkaEvolve: Towards Open-Ended And Sample-Efficient Program Evolution
  6. 2025LLM-Guided Search for Deletion-Correcting Codes
  7. 2025CATArena: Evaluating Evolutionary Capabilities of Code Agents via Iterative Tournaments
  8. 2026SEVerA: Verified Synthesis of Self-Evolving Agents