ReLoop: Structured Modeling and Behavioral Verification for Reliable LLM-Based Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) can translate natural language into optimization code, but silent failures pose a critical risk: code that executes and returns solver-feasible solutions may encode semantically incorrect formulations, creating a feasibility-correctness gap of up to 90 percentage points on compositional problems. We introduce ReLoop, addressing silent failures from two complementary directions. Structured generation decomposes code production into a four-stage reasoning chain (understand, formalize, synthesize, verify) that mirrors expert modeling practice, with explicit variable-type reasoning and self-verification to prevent formulation errors at their source. Behavioral verification detects errors that survive generation by testing whether the formulation responds correctly to solver-based parameter perturbation, without requiring ground truth -- an external semantic signal that bypasses the self-consistency problem inherent in LLM-based code review. The two mechanisms are complementary: structured generation dominates on complex compositional problems, while behavioral verification becomes the largest single contributor on problems with localized formulation defects. Together with execution recovery via IIS-enhanced diagnostics, ReLoop raises correctness from 22.6% to 31.1% and execution from 72.1% to 100.0% on the strongest model, with consistent gains across five models spanning three paradigms (foundation, SFT, RL) and three benchmarks. We additionally release RetailOpt-190, 190 compositional retail optimization scenarios targeting the multi-constraint interactions where LLMs most frequently fail.

TwistNet-2D: Learning Second-Order Channel Interactions via Spiral Twisting for Texture Recognition

Second-order feature statistics are central to texture recognition, yet current methods face a fundamental tension: bilinear pooling and Gram matrices capture global channel correlations but collapse spatial structure, while self-attention models spatial context through weighted aggregation rather than explicit pairwise feature interactions. We introduce TwistNet-2D, a lightweight module that computes \emph{local} pairwise channel products under directional spatial displacement, jointly encoding where features co-occur and how they interact. The core component, Spiral-Twisted Channel Interaction (STCI), shifts one feature map along a prescribed direction before element-wise channel multiplication, thereby capturing the cross-position co-occurrence patterns characteristic of structured and periodic textures. Aggregating four directional heads with learned channel reweighting and injecting the result through a sigmoid-gated residual path, \TwistNet incurs only 3.5% additional parameters and 2% additional FLOPs over ResNet-18, yet consistently surpasses both parameter-matched and substantially larger baselines -- including ConvNeXt, Swin Transformer, and hybrid CNN--Transformer architectures -- across four texture and fine-grained recognition benchmarks.

A Quantum-Driven Evolutionary Framework for Solving High-Dimensional Sharpe Ratio Portfolio Optimization

High-dimensional portfolio optimization faces significant computational challenges under complex constraints, with traditional optimization methods struggling to balance convergence speed and global exploration capability. To address this, firstly, we introduce an enhanced Sharpe ratio-based model that incorporates all constraints into the objective function using adaptive penalty terms, transforming the original constrained problem into an unconstrained single-objective formulation. This approach preserves financial interpretability while simplifying algorithmic implementation. To efficiently solve the resulting high-dimensional optimization problem, we propose a Quantum Hybrid Differential Evolution (QHDE) algorithm, which integrates Quantum-inspired probabilistic behavior into the standard DE framework. QHDE employs a Schrodinger-inspired probabilistic mechanism for population evolution, enabling more flexible and diversified solution updates. To further enhance performance, a good point set-chaos reverse learning strategy is adopted to generate a well-dispersed initial population, and a dynamic elite pool combined with Cauchy-Gaussian hybrid perturbations strengthens global exploration and mitigates premature convergence. Experimental validation on CEC benchmarks and real-world portfolios involving 20 to 80 assets demonstrates that QHDE's performance improves by up to 73.4%. It attains faster convergence, higher solution precision, and greater robustness than seven state-of-the-art counterparts, thereby confirming its suitability for complex, high-dimensional portfolio optimization and advancing quantum-inspired evolutionary research in computational finance.

OPAL: Operator-Programmed Algorithms for Landscape-Aware Black-Box Optimization

Black-box optimization often relies on evolutionary and swarm algorithms whose performance is highly problem dependent. We view an optimizer as a short program over a small vocabulary of search operators and learn this operator program separately for each problem instance. We instantiate this idea in Operator-Programmed Algorithms (OPAL), a landscape-aware framework for continuous black-box optimization that uses a small design budget with a standard differential evolution baseline to probe the landscape, builds a $k$-nearest neighbor graph over sampled points, and encodes this trajectory with a graph neural network. A meta-learner then maps the resulting representation to a phase-wise schedule of exploration, restart, and local search operators. On the CEC~2017 test suite, a single meta-trained OPAL policy is statistically competitive with state-of-the-art adaptive differential evolution variants and achieves significant improvements over simpler baselines under nonparametric tests. Ablation studies on CEC~2017 justify the choices for the design phase, the trajectory graph, and the operator-program representation, while the meta-components add only modest wall-clock overhead. Overall, the results indicate that operator-programmed, landscape-aware per-instance design is a practical way forward beyond ad hoc metaphor-based algorithms in black-box optimization.

Deep Learning for Lung Cancer Detection: Tackling the Kaggle Data Science Bowl 2017 Challenge

We present a deep learning framework for computer-aided lung cancer diagnosis. Our multi-stage framework detects nodules in 3D lung CAT scans, determines if each nodule is malignant, and finally assigns a cancer probability based on these results. We discuss the challenges and advantages of our framework. In the Kaggle Data Science Bowl 2017, our framework ranked 41st out of 1972 teams.