Reasoning to Model and Solve General Optimization Problems with Limited Resources

View a PDF of the paper titled MiniOpt: Reasoning to Model and Solve General Optimization Problems with Limited Resources, by Ke Zhao and 11 other authors

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Abstract:Achieving strong optimization generalization across diverse optimization problems while requiring limited training resources remains a challenging problem for optimization-oriented large language models (LLMs). Existing learning-based methods, however, typically require large-scale supervised data, expensive intermediate step verification, and extensive computational resources, while exhibiting limited optimization generalization across diverse optimization structures. In this paper, we propose \textsc{MiniOpt}, a lightweight optimization-specialized LLM trained through a reasoning-to-model-and-solve paradigm and a two-stage training framework with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). MiniOpt encourages structure-oriented optimization learning by reinforcing the completeness of optimization formulations and optimization outcomes. Extensive experiments on eight optimization benchmarks demonstrate that MiniOpt consistently outperforms existing learning-based optimization models while requiring substantially fewer parameters and training data. To further understand optimization generalization, we introduce a complementary parameter-decoupled evaluation protocol that disentangles optimization structure understanding from numerical parameter processing. The results reveal that MiniOpt preserves optimization capability under parameter-decoupled settings significantly better than previous optimization-specialized models, suggesting that its performance gains primarily originate from stronger optimization structure understanding. These findings demonstrate an effective pathway toward efficient and generalizable optimization-specialized LLMs. The code is available at this https URL.