Evolutionary Ensemble Search: Council-Guided Program Evolution with Persistent Memory

Evolutionary Ensemble Search (EES) constructs machine-learning procedures through expert-guided program evolution. A role-specialized council turns task evidence and experimental results into structured search directions. An orchestrator allocates these directions to execution specialists and an evolutionary engine. The engine selects measured parents, diagnoses their errors, and produces descendants through code mutation, structured pipeline edits, and crossover. Each child must execute and acquire its own validation evidence. Population archives retain useful alternatives, while compatible predictions compete in a validation-gated ensemble stage. Search adapts through parent-relative operator credit, session memory, and problem-indexed lessons retrieved across runs. We specify these mechanisms, distinguish their execution profiles, and define the contracts required to compare candidates as their computations change. A public MLE-bench Lite development ledger records medal-threshold artifacts on 19 of 22 tasks (86.36%), with best outcomes of 11 gold, five silver, and three bronze. The procedures span text, images, tables, audio, scientific geometry, and deterministic transformations. The campaign includes grade feedback between runs, external-source routes, and mixed confirmation procedures; its aggregate is an achieved development result, not a blind autonomous-agent success rate. The report contributes a concrete architecture for cumulative executable search and a versioned account of its cross-modal development outcomes.