Jianghao Lin
Publications
OR-Space: A Full-Lifecycle Workspace Benchmark for Industrial Optimization Agents
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used to assist with operations research (OR) modeling, yet existing OR-oriented benchmarks often reduce evaluation to one-shot translation from a self-contained problem statement into a mathematical formulation or solver program. Such settings abstract away two characteristics of real industrial OR workflows: persistent multi-artifact workspaces and multi-stage task lifecycles. We introduce OR-Space, a full-lifecycle workspace benchmark for evaluating industrial optimization agents across model construction, model revision, and grounded explanation. Each instance is an executable workspace containing business documents, structured data, optional code artifacts, solver outputs, and task-specific evaluators distributed across interdependent files. OR-Space defines three task modes: Build, where agents construct solver-ready optimization models from heterogeneous artifacts; Revise, where agents modify existing models under changing requirements or solver feedback while preserving valid prior logic; and Explain, where agents answer grounded questions about solutions, constraints, and business implications using evidence spread across workspace artifacts. By combining persistent workspaces with lifecycle-oriented tasks, OR-Space evaluates whether agents can perform reliable optimization work beyond end-to-end text generation. We describe the benchmark design, evaluation protocol, and quality-control pipeline, and position OR-Space as a benchmark for studying the reliability, failure modes, and practical readiness of LLM agents in industrial OR workflows.
AlphaInventory: Evolving White-Box Inventory Policies via Large Language Models with Deployment Guarantees
We study how large language models can be used to evolve inventory policies in online, non-stationary environments. Our work is motivated by recent advances in LLM-based evolutionary search, such as AlphaEvolve, which demonstrates strong performance for static and highly structured problems such as mathematical discovery, but is not directly suited to online dynamic inventory settings. To this end, we propose AlphaInventory, an end-to-end inventory-policy evolution and inference framework grounded in confidence-interval-based certification. The framework trains a large language model using reinforcement learning, incorporates demand data as well as numerical and textual features beyond demand, and generates white-box inventory policy with statistical safety guarantees for deployment in future periods. We further introduce a unified theoretical interface that connects training, inference, and deployment. This allows us to characterize the probability that the AlphaInventory evolves a statistically safe and improved policy, and to quantify the deployment gap relative to the oracle-safe benchmark. Tested on both synthetic data and real-world retail data, AlphaInventory outperforms classical inventory policies and deep learning based methods. In canonical inventory settings, it evolves new policies that improve upon existing benchmarks.
From Soliloquy to Agora: Memory-Enhanced LLM Agents with Decentralized Debate for Optimization Modeling
Optimization modeling underpins real-world decision-making in logistics, manufacturing, energy, and public services, but reliably solving such problems from natural-language requirements remains challenging for current large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose \emph{Agora-Opt}, a modular agentic framework for optimization modeling that combines decentralized debate with a read-write memory bank. Agora-Opt allows multiple agent teams to independently produce end-to-end solutions and reconcile them through an outcome-grounded debate protocol, while memory stores solver-verified artifacts and past disagreement resolutions to support training-free improvement over time. This design is flexible across both backbones and methods: it reduces base-model lock-in, transfers across different LLM families, and can be layered onto existing pipelines with minimal coupling. Across public benchmarks, Agora-Opt achieves the strongest overall performance among all compared methods, outperforming strong zero-shot LLMs, training-centric approaches, and prior agentic baselines. Further analyses show robust gains across backbone choices and component variants, and demonstrate that decentralized debate offers a structural advantage over centralized selection by enabling agents to refine candidate solutions through interaction and even recover correct formulations when all initial candidates are flawed. These results suggest that reliable optimization modeling benefits from combining collaborative cross-checking with reusable experience, and position Agora-Opt as a practical and extensible foundation for trustworthy optimization modeling assistance. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CHIANGEL/Agora-Opt.