PPaperPicks

Niki van Stein

Leiden University, The Netherlands

20 papers at tracked venues · 2 at CORE A* · active 2024–2026

DBLP profile ↗ORCID 0000-0002-0013-7969 ↗Homepage ↗

Venues

GECCO ×15PPSN ×2AAAI ×1AAMAS ×1NeurIPS ×1

Frequent coauthors

Thomas Bäck
×13
Anna V. Kononova
×9
Aske Plaat
×3
Haoran Yin
×3
Francesca Da Ros
×1
Tarik Zaciragic
×1
Furong Ye
×1
Frank Neumann
×1
Johana Chen
×1
Robert Cabri
×1
Xi Chen
×1
Wenhu Li
×1

Papers

  1. Assessing Reproducibility in Evolutionary Computation: A Case Study using Human- and LLM-based Assessment
    GECCO 2026 ·
    Francesca Da Ros
    ,
    Tarik Zaciragic
    ,
    Aske Plaat
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
    , Niki van Stein
  2. Block-Bench: A Framework for Controllable and Transparent Discrete Optimization Benchmarking
    GECCO 2026 ·
    Furong Ye
    ,
    Frank Neumann
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
    , Niki van Stein
  3. EvoHIIT: Preference-Based Selection in LLM-Assisted Evolutionary Design of Natural Language Solutions
    GECCO 2026 ·
    Johana Chen
    , Niki van Stein,
    Robert Cabri
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
    ,
    Anna V. Kononova
  4. How Does Chain of Thought Think? Mechanistic Interpretability of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Sparse Autoencoding
    AAAI 2026 ·
    Xi Chen
    ,
    Aske Plaat
    , Niki van Stein
  5. LLaMEA-BO: A Large Language Model Evolutionary Algorithm for Automatically Generating Bayesian Optimization Algorithms
    GECCO 2026 ·
    Wenhu Li
    , Niki van Stein,
    Thomas Bäck
    ,
    Elena Raponi
  6. Landscape-aware Automated Algorithm Design: An Efficient Framework for Real-world Optimization
    GECCO 2026 ·
    Haoran Yin
    ,
    Shuaiqun Pan
    ,
    Zhao Wei
    ,
    Jian Cheng Wong
    ,
    Yew-Soon Ong
    ,
    Anna Kononova
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
    , Niki van Stein
  7. Large Language Models for Metaheuristic Design: Exploring Challenges, Limitations, Tools, Benchmarking and Future Opportunities
    GECCO 2026 ·
    Roman Senkerik
    , Niki van Stein,
    Adam Viktorin
    ,
    Michal Pluhacek
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
  8. Optimizing for Difference: LLM-Driven Benchmark Design for Maximum Solver Discriminability
    GECCO 2026 ·
    Ananta Shahane
    , Niki van Stein
  9. Structural Bias in Multi-objective Optimization
    GECCO 2026 ·
    Jakub Kudela
    , Niki van Stein,
    Thomas Bäck
    ,
    Anna Kononova
  10. BLADE: Benchmark suite for LLM-driven Automated Design and Evolution of iterative optimisation heuristics
    GECCO 2025 · Niki van Stein,
    Anna V. Kononova
    ,
    Haoran Yin
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
  11. Code Evolution Graphs: Understanding Large Language Model Driven Design of Algorithms
    GECCO 2025 · Niki van Stein,
    Anna V. Kononova
    ,
    Lars Kotthoff
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
  12. EconoJax: A Fast & Scalable Economic Simulation in JAX
    AAMAS 2025 ·
    Koen Ponse
    ,
    Aske Plaat
    , Niki van Stein,
    Thomas M. Moerland
  13. Explainable Benchmarking for Iterative Optimization Heuristics
    GECCO 2025 · Niki van Stein,
    Diederick Vermetten
    ,
    Anna V. Kononova
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
  14. LLaMEA: Automatically Generating Metaheuristics with Large Language Models
    GECCO 2025 · Niki van Stein,
    Thomas Bäck
  15. Neighborhood Adaptive Differential Evolution
    GECCO 2025 · Niki van Stein
  16. Optimizing Photonic Structures with Large Language Model Driven Algorithm Discovery
    GECCO 2025 ·
    Haoran Yin
    ,
    Anna V. Kononova
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
    , Niki van Stein
  17. Scalable, Explainable and Provably Robust Anomaly Detection with One-Step Flow Matching
    NeurIPS 2025 ·
    Zhong Li
    ,
    Qi Huang
    ,
    Yuxuan Zhu
    ,
    Lincen Yang
    ,
    Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri
    , Niki van Stein,
    Matthijs van Leeuwen
  18. Structural bias in optimization algorithms
    GECCO 2025 ·
    Anna V. Kononova
    , Niki van Stein
  19. A Deep Dive Into Effects of Structural Bias on CMA-ES Performance Along Affine Trajectories
    PPSN 2024 · Niki van Stein,
    Sarah L. Thomson
    ,
    Anna V. Kononova
  20. Landscape-Aware Automated Algorithm Configuration Using Multi-output Mixed Regression and Classification
    PPSN 2024 ·
    Fu Xing Long
    ,
    Moritz Frenzel
    ,
    Peter Krause
    ,
    Markus Gitterle
    ,
    Thomas Bäck
    , Niki van Stein