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Automatic software system optimization can improve software speed, reduce operating costs, and save energy. Traditional approaches to optimization rely on manual tuning and compiler heuristics, limiting their ability to generalize across diverse codebases and system contexts. Recent methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) offer automation to address these limitations, but often fail to scale to the complexity of realworld software systems and applications. We present SysLLMatic, a system that integrates LLMs with profiling-guided feedback and system performance insights to automatically optimize software code. We evaluate it on three benchmark suites: HumanEval CPP (competitive programming in C++), SciMark2 (scientific kernels in Java), and DaCapoBench (large-scale software systems in Java). Results show that SysLLMatic can improve system performance, including latency, throughput, energy efficiency, memory usage, and CPU utilization. It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM baselines on microbenchmarks. On large-scale application codes, it surpasses traditional compiler optimizations, achieving average relative improvements of 1.85× in latency and 2.24× in throughput. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs, guided by principled systems thinking and appropriate performance diagnostics, can serve as viable software system optimizers. We further identify limitations of our approach and the challenges involved in handling complex applications. This work provides a foundation for generating optimized code across various languages, benchmarks, and program sizes in a principled manner. Index Terms—Software Engineering, Automatic Programming, 

Performative prediction, as introduced by Perdomo et al, is a framework for studying social prediction in which the data distribution itself changes in response to the deployment of a model. Existing work in this field usually hinges on three assumptions that are easily violated in practice: that the performative risk is convex over the deployed model, that the mapping from the model to the data distribution is known to the model designer in advance, and the first-order information of the performative risk is available. In this paper, we initiate the study of performative prediction problems that do not require these assumptions. Specifically, we develop a reparameterization framework that reparametrizes the performative prediction objective as a function of the induced data distribution. We then develop a two-level zeroth-order optimization procedure, where the first level performs iterative optimization on the distribution parameter space, and the second level learns the model that induces a particular target distribution at each iteration. Under mild conditions, this reparameterization allows us to transform the non-convex objective into a convex one and achieve provable regret guarantees. In particular, we provide a regret bound that is sublinear in the total number of performative samples taken and is only polynomial in the dimension of the model parameter. 

Energy-efficient software helps improve mobile de- vice experiences and reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. However, energy goals are often de-prioritized in order to meet other requirements. We take inspiration from recent work exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) for different software engineering activities. We propose a novel application of LLMs: as code optimizers for energy efficiency. We describe and evaluate a prototype, finding that over 6 small programs our system can improve energy efficiency in 3 of them, up to 2x better than compiler optimizations alone. From our experience, we identify some of the challenges of energy-efficient LLM code optimization and propose a research agenda. 

We study a natural competitive-information-design variant for the Pandora’s Box problem [31], where each box is associated with a strategic information sender who can design what information about the box’s prize value to be revealed to the agent when she inspects the box. This variant with strategic boxes is motivated by a wide range of real-world economic applications for Pandora’s box. The main contributions of this article are two-fold: (1) we study informational properties of Pandora’s Box by analyzing how a box’s partial information revelation affects the search agent’s optimal decisions; and (2) we fully characterize the pure symmetric equilibrium for the boxes’ competitive information revelation, which reveals various insights regarding information competition and the resultant agent utility at equilibrium.