OPAL: Operator-Programmed Algorithms for Landscape-Aware Black-Box Optimization

Black-box optimization often relies on evolutionary and swarm algorithms whose performance is highly problem dependent. We view an optimizer as a short program over a small vocabulary of search operators and learn this operator program separately for each problem instance. We instantiate this idea in Operator-Programmed Algorithms (OPAL), a landscape-aware framework for continuous black-box optimization that uses a small design budget with a standard differential evolution baseline to probe the landscape, builds a k-nearest neighbor graph over sampled points, and encodes this trajectory with a graph neural network. A meta-learner then maps the resulting representation to a phase-wise schedule of exploration, restart, and local search operators. On the CEC~2017 test suite, a single meta-trained OPAL policy is statistically competitive with state-of-the-art adaptive differential evolution variants and achieves significant improvements over simpler baselines under nonparametric tests. Ablation studies on CEC~2017 justify the choices for the design phase, the trajectory graph, and the operator-program representation, while the meta-components add only modest wall-clock overhead. Overall, the results indicate that operator-programmed, landscape-aware per-instance design is a practical way forward beyond ad hoc metaphor-based algorithms in black-box optimization.