Congratulations to the winners of the the #IJCAI2023 distinguished paper awards

The IJCAI distinguished paper awards recognise some of the best papers presented at the conference each year. This year, three articles were named as distinguished papers. Abstract: Levin Tree Search (LTS) is a search algorithm that makes use of a policy (a probability distribution over actions) and comes with a theoretical guarantee on the number of expansions before reaching a goal node, depending on the quality of the policy. This guarantee can be used as a loss function, which we call the LTS loss, to optimize neural networks representing the policy (LTS NN). In this work we show that the neural network can be substituted with parameterized context models originating from the online compression literature (LTS CM). We show that the LTS loss is convex under this new model, which allows for using standard convex optimization tools, and obtain convergence guarantees to the optimal parameters in an online setting for a given set of solution trajectories -- guarantees that cannot be provided for neural networks.