Metaheuristic comparisons are often reported at evaluation budgets far larger than an expensive engineering simulation can afford. This paper presents REMBGO, an evaluation-budget-aware refinement of…
Long-horizon tasks require LLM agents to continually draw on information from earlier interactions. However, retaining the full history increases context costs, while compressing it risks losing…
EliteTable is a self-improving program-search algorithm guided by large language models (LLMs) that uses a fixed-capacity table of high-scoring solutions to guide new proposals, edits of existing…
Black-box optimization (BBO) arises in many scientific and engineering problems where objective evaluations are expensive and limited. Recent large language model (LLM) agents offer a new way to…
Energy-based models have shown promising properties for domain-specific tasks but remain challenging in modeling general-purpose scenarios. To bridge this gap, we design energy-steered models (ESMs)…
Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference through parallel verification of tokens proposed by a drafter. Diffusion drafters further parallelize proposal generation, but greater…
Small tabular datasets with expert-designed spectral features are the norm in operational Earth observation, and the networks applied to them are typically hand-designed. We revisit one such…
We study a sequential pricing problem in which a seller jointly posts a price and an advertisement generated by a large language model (LLM). The seller aims to maximize revenue under an unknown…
Since their introduction, modern evolution strategies, such as the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), have become established as powerful methods for continuous black-box…
Calibrated uncertainty quantification is essential to ensuring AI agents are trustworthy and reliable. However, when agents seek to maximize user engagement or revenue, confidence reports may be…
Dasgupta, Stevens and Navlakha (2017) showed that the Drosophila olfactory circuit, modelled as a random sparse projection followed by winner-take-all, is a locality-sensitive hash that beats…
Several discrete design tasks, such as molecular discovery, require diverse collections of useful candidates at low computational cost. High validity alone does not guarantee a useful candidate…
Memory has become integral to the LLM agent ecosystem, supporting information retention and reuse across interactions. However, most existing agent memory systems construct memory in a query-agnostic…
When multiple agents share a cost budget, a common Lagrange multiplier can enforce the aggregate constraint but does not determine how its penalty should be allocated across agents. Uniform penalties…
We study an online trading problem where a trader, given a sequence of i.i.d. prices drawn from a known distribution $F$ on $[0,1]$, must make irrevocable buy, sell, or hold decisions subject to…
Agentic buyers can cheaply fork a procurement task into many parallel negotiations, but concurrency is not free: every thread consumes resources, and simultaneous agreements create cancellation and…
We study last-iterate convergence in unknown two-player zero-sum discounted Markov games with bandit feedback. The players learn independently along a single trajectory without observing each other's…
Evaluating the causal effect of new features is a central goal for online platforms. While recent literature addresses limited testing traffic via centralized portfolio optimization, this perspective…
Recursive language-model agents decompose tasks and delegate subtasks to child instances of the same policy, forming a tree of work. Training them, however, is hard: the final outcome is verifiable,…
The electric autonomous dial-a-ride problem (EADARP) extends the classical dial-a-ride problem by incorporating battery and charging constraints for electric vehicles. In practice, travel-time…