We present Oracle-Based Partial Evaluation (OBPE), a novel approach to on-line Partial Evaluation (PE) which decides the control strategy to use for each call pattern by using an oracle function which compares the results of specializing such call pattern w.r.t. a set of strategies. Our proposal is motivated by Poly-Controlled Partial Evaluation (PCPE), which allows using different control strategies for different call patterns. Given a set CS of control strategies, the best PCPE specialized programs outperform the specialized programs obtained by traditional PE for any of the control strategies in CS, especially when resource-aware specialization is performed. Unfortunately, computing all PCPE specialized programs and then choosing a posteriori the best one is too costly in practice. In contrast, in OBPE a single specialized program is computed. We have developed an empirical oracle whose parameters are approximated from a set of training data, by using constraint logic programming. ...