Abstract
Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) is an effective framework for solving complex optimization problems. The development of large language models (LLMs) enables the automated generation of heuristics. Existing LLM-based evolutionary methods rely on population strategies and are prone to local optima. Integrating LLMs with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) improves the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, but multi-round cognitive integration remains limited and search diversity is constrained. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel cognitive-guided MCTS framework (CogMCTS). CogMCTS tightly integrates the cognitive guidance mechanism of LLMs with MCTS to achieve efficient automated heuristic optimization. The framework employs multi-round cognitive feedback to incorporate historical experience, node information, and negative outcomes, dynamically improving heuristic generation. Dual-track node expansion combined with elite heuristic management balances the explo