An important Bottleneck in LLM Optimizers: Principle-Level Local Optima

Feedback-driven LLM optimizers are increasingly used for evolutionary search, Bayesian optimization, heuristic design, and scientific discovery. Yet rapid initial gains often give way to prolonged plateaus despite substantial remaining evaluation budgets. We investigate **principle-level search collapse**, where an optimizer’s search becomes confined to a narrow set of design principles, even though it may continue to generate distinct candidates and achieve small improvements. We assemble a diagnostic benchmark spanning molecular optimization, network sentinel-node selection, and GPU-kernel optimization, and introduce a decision-tree protocol combining principle narrowing, prolonged performance plateaus, and gaps to attainable reference solutions. Across 161 assessable runs on the three problem domains, 78.3% receive support for collapse, including 55.3% with strong support. Candidate-level variation can nevertheless conceal restricted search at the principle level. We then test diversity injection, a common response to search stagnation, such as higher t, multiple LLMs, and web search, and show that it provides limited and inconsistent benefits: among 65 molecular runs, still 73.8% and 53.8% receive support and strong support respectively. We finally test reference-principle interventions and find that they improve some runs, but their benefits vary across models and tasks: access to a better principle does not guarantee its effective use. Our benchmark and diagnostic protocol provide a basis for evaluating future optimizers on principle-level collapse. Our findings highlight the need for online collapse detection and better mechanisms for generating and maintaining alternative principles during optimization.