Component-Aware Feedback for Self-Evolving Programs

Abstract

LLM-guided evolutionary search can discover complex programs, but existing methods mostly only save candidate programs and fitness scores while discarding which component edits produced which fitness metric changes. Existing methods force the mutator LLM to infer the effect of prior edits from cluttered histories, making program search slow and unstable. This is especially true for locally servable LLMs to evolve multi-component systems. We introduce component-aware feedback, which compares each evaluated program with its parent, identifies the components that changed, and logs them with the associated metric differences into an attribution memory that later mutations read. The memory keeps each change in two reference frames, local against the parent it came from and global against the seed program, which shows both the immediate effect of a change and the cumulative progress made since the seed. We study this on LLM reranking, a multi-objective optimization problem where a multi-stage pipeline must balance quality against serving cost. Across twelve \textsc{Bright} datasets, our method reaches the strongest baseline's final quality after a median of one third of the search budget and ends 7.2\% higher in held-out nDCG@10, and under a cost-aware objective it finds pipelines that are on average more accurate while using 11\% fewer tokens per query, showing component-aware feedback to be a promising direction for more efficient self-evolving systems.