@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-makes,
    title = "What Makes an {LLM} a Good Optimizer? A Trajectory Analysis of {LLM}-Guided Evolutionary Search",
    author = "Zhang, Xinhao  and
      Chen, Xi  and
      Portet, Fran{\textbackslash}c{\{}c{\}}ois  and
      Peyrard, Maxime",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1252/",
    pages = "24987--25011",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1"
}