Evolutionary coding agents such as AlphaEvolve are one of the notable successes in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to build AI Scientists. These agents tackle open-ended scientific problems by iteratively improving and evolving programs, leveraging the prior knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Despite their success, mutations over programs are mostly low-level upon surface heuristics, without a persistent unit of control. In contrast, science compounds through ideas. In this work, we propose ExpEvolve, which injects idea-level extraction and control into evolution: it discovers and leverages the high-level factors from programs that explain scoring differences among different programs. We characterize theoretical conditions on when discovery with idea factors improves sample efficiency. We also build a practical framework to show that the extracted high-level idea factors are helpful for guiding exploitation from experience and exploration when discovery comes to a plateau. Across 11 open-ended mathematical tasks, ExpEvolve significantly improves the final performance and sample efficiency up to 5.0x. The improvements also transfer to 4 other LLMs and to 6 machine learning tasks from MLS-Bench. Analysis shows that ExpEvolve can discover idea-level factors to provide better exploration and exploitation for evolutionary discovery.

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