Automated Discovery Has No Universally Superior Harness
Autonomous discovery systems such as OpenEvolve and TTT-Discover are often used as general-purpose harnesses. However, in practice these are composite systems combining several design choices about archives, parent selection, exploration, and budget allocation into a single recipe. Because discovery runs are expensive and inherently stochastic, existing harnesses are often compared using too few independent trials to distinguish key methodological improvements from run-to-run variance. We systematically decompose OpenEvolve-style evolutionary search and the TTT-Discover search harness into its constituent components and systematically evaluate 30 budget-matched harnesses across 12 model-p...
| Authors | Akshat Gupta, Jermaine Lei, Alexander Lu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 July 2026 |
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