Lyria: A General LLM-Driven Genetic Algorithm Framework for Problem Solving

Abstract: While LLMs have demonstrated impressive abilities across various domains, they still struggle with complex problems characterized by multi-objective optimization, precise constraint satisfaction, immense solution spaces, etc. To address the limitation, drawing on the superior semantic understanding ability of LLMs and also the outstanding global search and optimization capability of genetic algorithms, we propose to capitalize on their respective strengths and introduce Lyria, a general LLM-driven genetic algorithm framework, comprising 7 essential components. Through conducting extensive experiments with 4 LLMs across 3 types of problems, we demonstrated the efficacy of Lyria. Additionally, with 7 additional ablation experiments, we further systematically analyzed and elucidated the factors that affect its performance.