FrontierOR: Benchmarking LLMs' Capacity for Efficient Algorithm Design in Large-Scale OptimizationMinwei Kong, Chonghe Jiang, Ao Qu, Wenbin Ouyang, Zhaoming Zeng, Xiaotong Guo, Zhekai Li, Junyi Li, Yi Fan, Xinshou Zheng, Xi Jing, Yikai Zhang, Zhiwei Liang, Seonghoo Kim, Runqing Yang, Sirui Li, Han Zheng, Wangyang Ying, Ou Zheng, Chonghuan Wang, Jinglong Zhao, Paul Liang, Jinhua Zhao, Hai Wang
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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for optimization modeling and solver-code generation, yet practical operations research often requires a harder capability: designing scalable algorithms that exploit problem structure and outperform direct formulation-and-solve baselines. Existing benchmarks are limited to small or simplified examples far below real-world scale and complexity. We introduce **FrontierOR**, the first large-scale benchmark targeting LLM-based efficient algorithm design for realistic optimization problems. FrontierOR includes 110 tasks derived from methodologically diverse papers published in top-tier operations research venues, each with standardized instances and a hidden, human-verified evaluation suite. We evaluate seven frontier LLMs in one-shot and test-time evolution settings. The results reveal that frontier models still struggle to move from executable formulations to efficient optimization algorithms: the strongest one-shot model outperforms Gurobi in only **39\%** of cases in terms of both solution quality and runtime, and even strong coding agents with test-time evolution achieve only **50\%** on selected hard tasks. FrontierOR establishes a practical evaluation platform for LLM-based optimization algorithm design, which enables future LLMs and agents to be systematically tested on whether they can move beyond correct formulation toward feasible, high-quality, and runtime-competitive algorithms.