Combining LLMs and Genetic Search for ARC-AGI-2

LLMs can generate programs for ARC-AGI-2 tasks, but the provided compute only allows a small number of attempts to generate, debug and validate solutions. Genetic algorithms can search and test many more programs, but random search rarely starts in a useful neighborhood of the solution space. We combine the two methods through a compact domain specific language (DSL). First, a quantized Qwen3.5-4B LLM generates an initial set of programs for each ARCAGI-2 task. Then, we use those programs to seed an initial population of starting programs, and use genetic algorithms to evolve these programs towards a solution to the given task. The DSL is designed such that every mutated program remains valid and can be executed. The initial programs proposed by the LLM solve 2 (3.3%) of the first 60 tasks of the ARC-2 public evaluation set. The genetic algorithm solves an additional 4, giving 6 correct test outputs in total (10.0%). If we try using evolving solutions without this LLM seeding, we do not arrive at any solutions at all. The results show that genetic search can improve programs generated by LLMs and produce additional correct solutions.