Search
Transfer Faster, Price Smarter: Minimax Dynamic Pricing under Cross-Market Preference Shift
We study contextual dynamic pricing when a target market can leverage Kauxiliary markets--offline logs or concurrent streams--whose mean utilities differ by a structured preference shift. We propose Cross-Market Transfer Dynamic Pricing (CM-TDP), the first algorithm that provably handles such model-shift transfer and delivers minimax-optimal regret for both linear and nonparametric utility models. For linear utilities of dimension d, where the difference between source-and targettask coefficients is s0-sparse, CM-TDP attains regret eO (dK 1 + s0) log T .
Learning Interestingness in Automated Mathematical Theory Formation
We take two key steps in automating the open-ended discovery of new mathematical theories, a grand challenge in artificial intelligence. First, we introduce FERMAT, a reinforcement learning (RL) environment that models concept discovery and theorem-proving using a set of symbolic actions, opening up a range of RL problems relevant to theory discovery. Second, we explore a specific problem through FERMAT: automatically scoring the interestingness of mathematical objects. We investigate evolutionary algorithms for synthesizing nontrivial interestingness measures. In particular, we introduce an LLM-based evolutionary algorithm that features function abstraction, leading to notable improvements in discovering elementary number theory and finite fields over hard-coded baselines.
On the Convergence of Single-Timescale Actor-Critic
We analyze the global convergence of the single-timescale actor-critic (AC) algorithm for the infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with finite state spaces. To this end, we introduce an elegant analytical framework for handling complex, coupled recursions inherent in the algorithm. Leveraging this framework, we establish that the algorithm converges to an ฯต-close globally optimal policy with a sample complexity of O(ฯต 3). This significantly improves upon the existing complexity of O(ฯต 2)to achieve ฯต-close stationary policy, which is equivalent to the complexity of O(ฯต 4)to achieve ฯต-close globally optimal policy using gradient domination lemma.
AIResearch Agents for Machine Learning: Search, Exploration, and Generalization in MLE-bench
AI research agents are demonstrating great potential to accelerate scientific progress by automating the design, implementation, and training of machine learning models. We focus on methods for improving agents' performance on MLE-bench, a challenging benchmark where agents compete in Kaggle competitions to solve real-world machine learning problems. We formalize AI research agents as search policies that navigate a space of candidate solutions, iteratively modifying them using operators. By designing and systematically varying different operator sets and search policies (Greedy, MCTS, Evolutionary), we show that their interplay is critical for achieving high performance. Our best pairing of search strategy and operator set achieves a state-of-the-art result on MLE-bench lite, increasing the success rate of achieving a Kaggle medal from 39.6 % to 47.7 %. Our investigation underscores the importance of jointly considering the search strategy, operator design, and evaluation methodology in advancing automated machine learning.
RoME Domain Robust Mixture of Experts for Solution Prediction across Domains
Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a fundamental and powerful framework for modeling complex optimization problems across diverse domains. Recently, learning-based methods have shown great promise in accelerating MILP solvers by predicting high-quality solutions. However, most existing approaches are developed and evaluated in single-domain settings, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen problem distributions. This limitation poses a major obstacle to building scalable and general-purpose learning-based solvers. To address this challenge, we introduce RoME, a domain-Robust Mixture-of-Experts framework for predicting MILP solutions across domains.
Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Search
In this work, we aim to develop an MLLM that understands and solves questions by learning to create each intermediate step of the reasoning involved till the final answer. To this end, we propose Collective Monte Carlo Tree Search (CoMCTS), a new learning-to-reason method for MLLMs, which introduces the concept of collective learning into "tree search" for effective and efficient reasoning-path searching and learning. The core idea of CoMCTS is to leverage collective knowledge from multiple models to collaboratively conjecture, search and identify effective reasoning paths toward correct answers via four iterative operations including Expansion, Simulation and Error Positioning, Backpropagation, and Selection. Using CoMCTS, we construct Mulberry-260k, a multimodal dataset with a tree of rich, explicit and well-defined reasoning nodes for each question. With Mulberry-260k, we perform collective SFT to train our model, Mulberry, a series of MLLMs with o1-like step-by-step Reasoning and Reflection capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods on various benchmarks.
ProtInvTree: Deliberate Protein Inverse Folding with Reward-guided Tree Search
Designing protein sequences that fold into a target 3D structure--known as protein inverse folding--is a fundamental challenge in protein engineering. While recent deep learning methods have achieved impressive performance by recovering native sequences, they often overlook the one-to-many nature of the problem: multiple diverse sequences can fold into the same structure.
Towards Generalizable Multi-Policy Optimization with Self-Evolution for Job Scheduling
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promising results in solving Job Scheduling Problems (JSPs), automatically deriving powerful dispatching rules from data without relying on expert knowledge. However, most RL-based methods train only a single decision-maker, which limits exploration capability and leaves significant room for performance improvement. Moreover, designing reward functions for different JSP variants remains a challenging and labor-intensive task. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel and generic learning framework that optimizes multiple policies sharing a common objective and a single neural network, while enabling each policy to learn specialized and diverse strategies. The model optimization process is fully guided by a self-labeling manner, eliminating the need for reward functions. In addition, we develop a training scheme that adaptively controls the imitation intensity to reflect the quality of self-labels. Experimental results show that our method effectively addresses the aforementioned challenges and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RL methods across six JSP variants. Furthermore, our approach also demonstrates strong performance on other combinatorial optimization problems, highlighting its versatility beyond JSPs.