Kurt Keutzer

Recent work such as AlphaEvolve has shown that combining LLM-driven optimization with evolutionary search can effectively improve programs, prompts, and algorithms across domains. In this paradigm, previously evaluated solutions are reused to guide the model toward new candidate solutions. Crucially, the effectiveness of this evolution process depends on the search strategy: how prior solutions are selected and varied to generate new candidates. However, most existing methods rely on fixed search strategies with predefined knobs (e.g., explore–exploit ratios) that remain static throughout execution. While effective in some settings, these approaches often fail to adapt across tasks, or even within the same task as the search space changes over time. We introduce EvoX, an adaptive evolution method that optimizes its own evolution process. EvoX jointly evolves candidate solutions and the search strategies used to generate them, continuously updating how prior solutions are selected and varied based on progress. This enables the system to dynamically shift between different strategies during the optimization process. Across nearly 200 real-world optimization tasks, EvoX consistently outperforms prior open frameworks, including OpenEvolve, ShinkaEvolve, and GEPA. It achieves the best open-source performance on Frontier-CS (+34\% median over the best AI solutions across 172 problems), matches or surpasses AlphaEvolve and human-designed state-of-the-art solutions on multiple benchmarks, and does so at more than 3$\times$ lower cost on average compared to existing open systems and Claude Code.

We show that verifier-free evolution is bottlenecked by both diversity and efficiency: without external correction, repeated evolution accelerates collapse toward narrow modes, while the uniform use of a high-cost model wastes compute and quickly becomes economically impractical. We introduce Squeeze Evolve, a unified multi-model orchestration framework for verifier-free evolutionary inference. Our approach is guided by a simple principle: allocate model capability where it has the highest marginal utility. stronger models are reserved for high-impact stages, while cheaper models handle the other stages at much lower costs. This principle addresses diversity and cost-efficiency jointly while remaining lightweight. Squeeze Evolve naturally supports open-source, closed-source, and mixed-model deployments. Across AIME 2025, HMMT 2025, LiveCodeBench V6, GPQA-Diamond, ARC-AGI-2, multimodal vision benchmarks (MMMU-Pro, BabyVision), and agentic settings (Terminal-Bench~2.0), Squeeze Evolve consistently improves the cost--capability frontier over single-model evolution and achieves new state-of-the-art results on several tasks. Empirically, Squeeze Evolve reduces API cost by up to $\sim$3$\times$ and increases fixed-budget serving throughput by up to $\sim$10$\times$. On circle packing, an open-ended continuous-objective task, Squeeze Evolve is the first verifier-free evolutionary method to exceed AlphaEvolve without executing programs or using closed-weight models.