# Think in Strategies, Act with Tools: Traceable Agentic Optimization for Combinatorial Problems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14736 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14736/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 33 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15334/) (2023)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03409/) (2023)
- [Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04406/) (2023)
- [ToolAlpaca: Generalized Tool Learning for Language Models with 3000 Simulated Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05301/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Plug-and-Play Compositional Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09842/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Tool Makers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17126/) (2023)
- [Evolution of Heuristics: Towards Efficient Automatic Algorithm Design Using Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02051/) (2024)
- [To CoT or not to CoT? Chain-of-thought helps mainly on math and symbolic reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12183/) (2024)
- [ToolkenGPT: Augmenting Frozen Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11554/) (2023)
- [ART: Automatic multi-step reasoning and tool-use for large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09014/) (2023)
- [ReWOO: Decoupling Reasoning from Observations for Efficient Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18323/) (2023)
- [CRAFT: Customizing LLMs by Creating and Retrieving from Specialized Toolsets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17428/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Evolutionary Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19046/) (2023)
- [OptiMUS: Scalable Optimization Modeling with (MI)LP Solvers and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10172/) (2024)
- [Monte Carlo Tree Search for Comprehensive Exploration in LLM-Based Automatic Heuristic Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08603/) (2025)
- [LLaMEA: A Large Language Model Evolutionary Algorithm for Automatically Generating Metaheuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20132/) (2024)
- [CREATOR: Tool Creation for Disentangling Abstract and Concrete Reasoning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14318/) (2023)
- [Confucius: Iterative Tool Learning from Introspection Feedback by Easy-to-Difficult Curriculum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14034/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Supply Chain Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03875/) (2023)
- [UDC: A Unified Neural Divide-and-Conquer Framework for Large-Scale Combinatorial Optimization Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00312/) (2024)
- [Towards Optimizing with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05204/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Optimization by PROmpting (OPRO) directly leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate candidate solutions through natural-language prompting. However, OPRO's optimization process is difficult to track, which prevents LLMs from capturing useful information accumulated over previous iterations, thereby limiting solution quality. To address this limitation, we propose a Tool-Augmented Strategic Agent (TASA) which summarizes and exploits trajectory to improve solution quality. Specifically, TASA plans the strategy for each step based on the optimization trajectory, which decomposes the optimization process into traceable strategy selections. Moreover, we leverage LLM to construct problem-specific tools and introduce a strategy-guided adaptive tool planner, which efficiently utilizes the information of trajectory to update solutions. We establish local convergence under persistent exploration and evaluate the complete framework under a shared candidate-evaluation budget. The results support its solution quality and the traceability of strategy-guided search.