We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) system called Regular Games (RG). The main goal of RG is to be both computationally efficient and convenient for game design. The system consists of several languages. The core component is a low-level language that defines the rules by a finite automaton. It is minimal with only a few mechanisms, which makes it easy for automatic processing (by agents, analysis, optimization, etc.). The language is universal for the class of all finite turn-based games with imperfect information. Higher-level languages are introduced for game design (by humans or Procedural Content Generation), which are eventually translated to a low-level language. RG generates faster forward models than the current state of the art, beating other GGP systems (Regular Boardgames, Ludii) in terms of efficiency. Additionally, RG's ecosystem includes an editor with LSP, automaton visualization, benchmarking tools, and a debugger of game description transformations.

Pre-trained vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a promising foundation for generalist robot policies, but often produce brittle behaviors or unsafe failures when deployed zero-shot in out-of-distribution scenarios. We present Vision-Language-Action Planning & Search (VLAPS) -- a novel framework and accompanying algorithms that embed model-based search into the inference procedure of pre-trained VLA policies to improve their performance on robotic tasks. Specifically, our method biases a modified Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm -- run using a model of the target environment -- using action priors defined by the VLA policy. By using VLA-derived abstractions and priors in model-based search, VLAPS efficiently explores language-conditioned robotics tasks whose search spaces would otherwise be intractably large. Conversely, by integrating model-based search with the VLA policy's inference procedure, VLAPS yields behaviors that are more performant than those obtained by directly following the VLA policy's action predictions. VLAPS offers a principled framework to: i) control test-time compute in VLA models, ii) leverage a priori knowledge of the robotic environment, and iii) integrate established planning and reinforcement learning techniques into the VLA inference process. Across all experiments, VLAPS significantly outperforms VLA-only baselines on language-specified tasks that would otherwise be intractable for uninformed search algorithms, increasing success rates by as much as 67 percentage points.

Abstract--In the domain of sponsored search advertising, the focus of Keyphrase recommendation has largely been on exact match types, which pose issues such as high management expenses, limited targeting scope, and evolving search query patterns. Alternatives like Broad match types can alleviate certain drawbacks of exact matches but present challenges like poor targeting accuracy and minimal supervisory signals owing to limited advertiser usage. This research defines the criteria for an ideal broad match, emphasizing on both efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring that a significant portion of matched queries are relevant. We propose BroadGen, an innovative framework that recommends efficient and effective broad match keyphrases by utilizing historical search query data. Additionally, we demonstrate that BroadGen, through token correspondence modeling, maintains better query stability over time. BroadGen's capabilities allow it to serve daily, millions of sellers at eBay with over 2.5 billion items. Advertisers or sellers on e-commerce platforms are recommended keyphrases by the platform to increase their item visibility depending on buyer searches as shown in Figure 1a. The sellers bid on relevant recommended keyphrases as well as their own custom keyphrases to increase their sales (Figure 1b). Keyphrase recommendation is the subject of a lot of research and well studied in several works [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], due to their challenging research and industrial importance. Additionally, the platform matches the (recommended) keyphrases bid by the sellers to the buyer search queries [8].

Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and reinforcement learning, such problems possess hidden convexity, meaning they can be reformulated as convex programs via a nonlinear invertible transformation. Typically such transformations are implicit or unknown, making the direct link with the convex program impossible. On the other hand, (sub-)gradients with respect to the original variables are often accessible or can be easily estimated, which motivates algorithms that operate directly in the original (non-convex) problem space using standard (sub-)gradient oracles. In this work, we develop the first algorithms to provably solve such non-convex problems to global minima. First, using a modified inexact proximal point method, we establish global last-iterate convergence guarantees with $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ oracle complexity in non-smooth setting. For smooth problems, we propose a new bundle-level type method based on linearly constrained quadratic subproblems, improving the oracle complexity to $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-1})$. Surprisingly, despite non-convexity, our methodology does not require any constraint qualifications, can handle hidden convex equality constraints, and achieves complexities matching those for solving unconstrained hidden convex optimization.

The WikiRace game, where players navigate between Wikipedia articles using only hyperlinks, serves as a compelling benchmark for goal-directed search in complex information networks. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of navigation strategies for this task, comparing agents guided by graph-theoretic structure (betweenness centrality), semantic meaning (language model embeddings), and hybrid approaches. Through rigorous benchmarking on a large Wikipedia sub-graph, we demonstrate that a purely greedy agent guided by the semantic similarity of article titles is overwhelmingly effective. This strategy, when combined with a simple loop-avoidance mechanism, achieved a perfect success rate and navigated the network with an efficiency an order of magnitude better than structural or hybrid methods. Our findings highlight the critical limitations of purely structural heuristics for goal-directed search and underscore the transformative potential of large language models to act as powerful, zero-shot semantic navigators in complex information spaces.

Proof-Number Search is a best-first search algorithm with many successful applications, especially in game solving. As large-scale computing clusters become increasingly accessible, parallelization is a natural way to accelerate computation. However, existing parallel versions of Proof-Number Search are known to scale poorly on many CPU cores. Using two parallelized levels and shared information among workers, we present the first massively parallel version of Proof-Number Search that scales efficiently even on a large number of CPUs. We apply our solver, enhanced with Grundy numbers for reducing game trees, to the Sprouts game, a case study motivated by the long-standing Sprouts Conjecture. Our solver achieves a significantly improved 332.9$\times$ speedup when run on 1024 cores, enabling it to outperform the state-of-the-art Sprouts solver GLOP by four orders of magnitude in runtime and to generate proofs 1,000$\times$ more complex. Despite exponential growth in game tree size, our solver verified the Sprouts Conjecture for 42 new positions, nearly doubling the number of known outcomes.

Recent advancements in bidirectional heuristic search have yielded significant theoretical insights and novel algorithms. While most previous work has concentrated on optimal search methods, this paper focuses on bounded-suboptimal bidirectional search, where a bound on the suboptimality of the solution cost is specified. We build upon the state-of-the-art optimal bidirectional search algorithm, BAE*, designed for consistent heuristics, and introduce several variants of BAE* specifically tailored for the bounded-suboptimal context. Through experimental evaluation, we compare the performance of these new variants against other bounded-suboptimal bidirectional algorithms as well as the standard weighted A* algorithm. Our results demonstrate that each algorithm excels under distinct conditions, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

Many sequential decision-making problems can be formulated as shortest-path problems, where the objective is to reach a goal state from a given starting state. Heuristic search is a standard approach for solving such problems, relying on a heuristic function to estimate the cost to the goal from any given state. Recent approaches leverage reinforcement learning to learn heuristics by applying deep approximate value iteration. These methods typically rely on single-step Bellman updates, where the heuristic of a state is updated based on its best neighbor and the corresponding edge cost. This work proposes a generalized approach that enhances both state sampling and heuristic updates by performing limited-horizon searches and updating each state's heuristic based on the shortest path to the search frontier, incorporating both edge costs and the heuristic values of frontier states.

In Facility Location problems there are agents that should be connected to facilities and locations where facilities may be opened so that agents can connect to them. We depart from Uncapacitated Facility Location and by assuming that the connection costs of agents to facilities are congestion dependent, we define a novel problem, namely, Facility Location for Congesting (Selfish) Commuters. The connection costs of agents to facilities come as a result of how the agents commute to reach the facilities in an underlying network with cost functions on the edges. Inapproximability results follow from the related literature and thus approximate solutions is all we can hope for. For when the cost functions are nondecreasing we employ in a novel way an approximate version of Caratheodory's Theorem [5] to show how approximate solutions for different versions of the problem can be derived. For when the cost functions are nonincreasing we show how this problem generalizes the Cost-Distance problem [38] and provide an algorithm that for this more general case achieves the same approximation guarantees.

I n light of this, we introduce MA TAI, a generalist ML framework for alloy property prediction and inverse design. Unlike task - specific models, MA TAI integrate s domain knowledge from diverse alloy systems and support s multi - objective, constraint - aware optimization across broad compositional spaces . The framework consists of four core components: 1) a holistic alloy database containing over 10,000 experimentally verified compositions, aggregated from open databases, literature, and in - house experiments; 2) foundational property predictor s capable of estimating multiple alloy properties such as density, yield strength (YS), ultimate tensile s trength (UTS), and elongation directly from alloy compositions; 3) a generalist alloy designer that performs constrained optimization over multiple objectives, enabling the discovery of promising alloy candidates without exhaustive searches; and 4) an iterative AI - experiment feedback loop that continuously refines the model through experimental validation of AI - generated candidates . To demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of MA TAI, we apply the framework to the titanium (Ti) - based alloys, a canonical aerospace alloy system valued for its low density with high strength . Using MA TAI, we identifi ed novel compositions that achieve high strength (>1000 MPa) and moderate elongation (>5%) while retaining a low density (< 4.45 g/cm