Since the AB2 orbitals seem to be good guesses for GVB methods, and yield orbitals close to converged CASSCF orbitals, this led us to believe that they could also provide a good description of valence excited states. State-specific methods, such as orbital-optimized DFT (OO-DFT) need a suitable starting guess, as convergence is typically to the nearest stationary point., so we used Sano and AB2 guesses for the π → π * excitation in methanal (H 2 CO). For our purposes we employed the square gradient minimization method which looks for saddle points in the orbital Hilbert space to converge restricted open-shell Kohn-Sham (ROKS). In Fig. we compare the overlap of the π * orbital from converged singlet open shell HF calculations with Sano and AB2 orbitals. For this excitation, AB2 orbitals overlap the optimized orbital by at least 0.9, and vary minimally with the size of the basis set. We note here that aside from the double-zeta case, converging the excited state starting from the Sano orbital sometimes lands on a Rydberg excited state, while AB2 landed on the correct π * state in all cases.