improv
Dynamic Configuration for Cutting Plane Separators via Reinforcement Learning on Incremental Graph
Cutting planes (cuts) are essential for solving mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problems, as they tighten the feasible solution space and accelerate the solving process. Modern MILP solvers offer diverse cutting plane separators to generate cuts, enabling users to leverage their potential complementary strengths to tackle problems with different structures. Recent machine learning approaches learn to configure separators based on problem-specific features, selecting effective separators and deactivating ineffective ones to save unnecessary computing time. However, they ignore the dynamics of separator efficacy at different stages of cut generation and struggle to adapt the configurations for the evolving problems after multiple rounds of cut generation. To address this challenge, we propose a novel dynamic separator configuration (DynSep) method that models separator configuration in different rounds as a reinforcement learning task, making decisions based on an incremental triplet graph updated by iteratively added cuts. Specifically, we tokenize the incremental subgraphs and utilize a decoder-only Transformer as our policy to autoregressively predict when to halt separation and which separators to activate at each round. Evaluated on synthetic and large-scale real-world MILP problems, DynSep speeds up average solving time by 64% on easy and medium datasets, and reduces primal-dual gap integral within the given time limit by 16% on hard datasets. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that DynSep well generalizes to MILP instances of significantly larger sizes than those seen during training.
Quantum Circuit Generation via test-time learning with large language models
Macarone-Palmieri, Adriano, Franco, Rosario Lo
Large language models (LLMs) can generate structured artifacts, but using them as dependable optimizers for scientific design requires a mechanism for iterative improvement under black-box evaluation. Here, we cast quantum circuit synthesis as a closed-loop, test-time optimization problem: an LLM proposes edits to a fixed-length gate list, and an external simulator evaluates the resulting state with the Meyer-Wallach (MW) global entanglement measure. We introduce a lightweight test-time learning recipe that can reuse prior high-performing candidates as an explicit memory trace, augments prompts with a score-difference feedback, and applies restart-from-the-best sampling to escape potential plateaus. Across fixed 20-qubit settings, the loop without feedback and restart-from-the-best improves random initial circuits over a range of gate budgets. To lift up this performance and success rate, we use the full learning strategy. For the 25-qubit, it mitigates a pronounced performance plateau when naive querying is used. Beyond raw scores, we analyze the structure of synthesized states and find that high MW solutions can correspond to stabilizer or graph-state-like constructions, but full connectivity is not guaranteed due to the metric property and prompt design. These results illustrate both the promise and the pitfalls of memory evaluator-guided LLM optimization for circuit synthesis, highlighting the critical role of prior human-made theoretical theorems to optimally design a custom tool in support of research.
Appendices
Each dataset contains miscellaneous series, categorized into six domains (micro, industry, macro, finance, demographic, other). Thus, atime series regression dataset consists ofT input-target pairs: {(X1,y1),...,(XT,yT). For each synthesized training set withT samples, we synthesize100T samples as the testing set. D.3 Models The NN we use has six fully-connected layers with ReLU activation function and three residual connections. D.4 Results There are three methods tobe compared.
Neural Graph Navigation for Intelligent Subgraph Matching
Ying, Yuchen, Dai, Yiyang, Li, Wenda, Huang, Wenjie, Wang, Rui, Zheng, Tongya, Wang, Yu, Yuan, Hanyang, Song, Mingli
Subgraph matching, a cornerstone of relational pattern detection in domains ranging from biochemical systems to social network analysis, faces significant computational challenges due to the dramatically growing search space. Existing methods address this problem within a filtering-ordering-enumeration framework, in which the enumeration stage recursively matches the query graph against the candidate subgraphs of the data graph. However, the lack of awareness of subgraph structural patterns leads to a costly brute-force enumeration, thereby critically motivating the need for intelligent navigation in subgraph matching. To address this challenge, we propose Neural Graph Navigation (NeuGN), a neuro-heuristic framework that transforms brute-force enumeration into neural-guided search by integrating neural navigation mechanisms into the core enumeration process. By preserving heuristic-based completeness guarantees while incorporating neural intelligence, NeuGN significantly reduces the \textit{First Match Steps} by up to 98.2\% compared to state-of-the-art methods across six real-world datasets.
Region-Point Joint Representation for Effective Trajectory Similarity Learning
Long, Hao, Zhou, Silin, Chen, Lisi, Shang, Shuo
Recent learning-based methods have reduced the computational complexity of traditional trajectory similarity computation, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods still fail to leverage the comprehensive spectrum of trajectory information for similarity modeling. To tackle this problem, we propose \textbf{RePo}, a novel method that jointly encodes \textbf{Re}gion-wise and \textbf{Po}int-wise features to capture both spatial context and fine-grained moving patterns. For region-wise representation, the GPS trajectories are first mapped to grid sequences, and spatial context are captured by structural features and semantic context enriched by visual features. For point-wise representation, three lightweight expert networks extract local, correlation, and continuous movement patterns from dense GPS sequences. Then, a router network adaptively fuses the learned point-wise features, which are subsequently combined with region-wise features using cross-attention to produce the final trajectory embedding. To train RePo, we adopt a contrastive loss with hard negative samples to provide similarity ranking supervision. Experiment results show that RePo achieves an average accuracy improvement of 22.2\% over SOTA baselines across all evaluation metrics.
Think Before Recommend: Unleashing the Latent Reasoning Power for Sequential Recommendation
Tang, Jiakai, Dai, Sunhao, Shi, Teng, Xu, Jun, Chen, Xu, Chen, Wen, Wu, Jian, Jiang, Yuning
Sequential Recommendation (SeqRec) aims to predict the next item by capturing sequential patterns from users' historical interactions, playing a crucial role in many real-world recommender systems. However, existing approaches predominantly adopt a direct forward computation paradigm, where the final hidden state of the sequence encoder serves as the user representation. We argue that this inference paradigm, due to its limited computational depth, struggles to model the complex evolving nature of user preferences and lacks a nuanced understanding of long-tail items, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{ReaRec}, the first inference-time computing framework for recommender systems, which enhances user representations through implicit multi-step reasoning. Specifically, ReaRec autoregressively feeds the sequence's last hidden state into the sequential recommender while incorporating special reasoning position embeddings to decouple the original item encoding space from the multi-step reasoning space. Moreover, we introduce two lightweight reasoning-based learning methods, Ensemble Reasoning Learning (ERL) and Progressive Reasoning Learning (PRL), to further effectively exploit ReaRec's reasoning potential. Extensive experiments on five public real-world datasets and different SeqRec architectures demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our proposed ReaRec. Remarkably, post-hoc analyses reveal that ReaRec significantly elevates the performance ceiling of multiple sequential recommendation backbones by approximately 30\%-50\%. Thus, we believe this work can open a new and promising avenue for future research in inference-time computing for sequential recommendation.