optimize_anything: Unified Text Optimization can Outperform Specialized Systems

optany is a single LLM-based optimization system that achieves state-of-the-art results across six diverse tasks simultaneously—nearly tripling Gemini Flash's ARC-AGI accuracy, cutting cloud scheduling costs 40%, and matching AlphaEvolve on circle packing—by framing all problems as improving a text artifact evaluated by a scoring function. The results challenge the assumption that domain-specific optimization tools are necessary.

Abstract

Can a single LLM-based optimization system match specialized tools across fundamentally different domains? We show that when optimization problems are formulated as improving a text artifact evaluated by a scoring function, a single AI-based optimization system—supporting single-task search, multi-task search with cross-problem transfer, and generalization to unseen inputs—achieves state-of-the-art results across six diverse tasks. Our system discovers agent architectures that nearly triple Gemini Flash's ARC-AGI accuracy (32.5% → 89.5%), finds scheduling algorithms that cut cloud costs by 40%, generates CUDA kernels where 87% match or beat PyTorch, and outperforms AlphaEvolve's reported circle packing solution (n=26). Ablations across three domains reveal that structured diagnostic feedback (side information) yields faster convergence and substantially higher final scores than score-only feedback, and that multi-task search outperforms independent optimization given equivalent per-problem budget through cross-task transfer, with benefits scaling with the number of related tasks. Together, we show for the first time that text optimization with LLM-based search is a general-purpose problem-solving paradigm, unifying tasks traditionally requiring domain-specific algorithms under a single framework. We open-source optimize_anything with support for multiple backends as part of the GEPA project at https://github.com/gepa-ai/gepa.