arXiv:2608. 01378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Design campaigns in chemistry, materials science, and machine learning share a bottleneck: determining how good a candidate truly is requires an expensive evaluation - an experiment, a first-principles simulation, or a full training run.
arXiv:2608. 15565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Experience-learning agents for optimization modeling improve by storing verified skills, but existing learners admit knowledge by checking against known answers, which real ticket streams do not provide.
arXiv:2606. 17529v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific machine-learning (SciML) surrogates approximate expensive simulations, but exact expected outputs for arbitrary inputs are unavailable (the oracle problem).
arXiv:2607. 14545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learned predictions can speed up offline NP-hard optimization, but asking a predictor what to do amounts to asking it to solve the problem, and committing an unchecked prediction forfeits every worst-case guarantee.
The paper investigates how AI systems that perform best‑of‑n search require different validation strategies as the search width changes. It shows that auditing only small search widths leaves a gap in reliability estimates for larger widths, and proposes retaining candidate ranks and truth labels to estimate reliability across all widths up to N. The authors derive theoretical bounds on the minimax mean‑squared error, design procedures that achieve these bounds, and demonstrate that a shared audit can significantly reduce maximum error across many widths in practical CodeRM pools.
The paper introduces Online Surrogate Repair (OSR), a closed‑loop algorithm that decouples the frequency of high‑fidelity evaluations from the length of an agent’s search by selectively updating a surrogate model with sparse, high‑fidelity data. An acquisition rule determines which candidate designs receive expensive evaluations, and the resulting labels refine the surrogate for subsequent episodes. Experiments on synthetic environments and the MADE benchmark show that OSR can reduce regret more efficiently than fixed‑surrogate approaches, requiring fewer oracle queries than high‑fidelity feedback after every episode.
Agentic systems have widened the gap between producing candidate outputs and reviewing them. This paper asks a practical architectural question: should domain specialization be built into an evaluator's weights, or into the rule that decides when its judgment can be trusted?
arXiv:2609.37493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Serving an answer from a large language model requires deciding when to abstain, yet a verifier's ranking accuracy alone does not determine the error...
arXiv:2608.29765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured pruning uses surrogate objectives because direct task evaluation over every feasible mask is too expensive. Most evaluations report average...
The paper introduces a diagnostic for reference‑free judge gates in text‑space skill optimization. It formalizes a judge as a latent solver, deriving a closed‑form bound on discriminability (ROC‑AUC) in terms of judge competence and answer‑space size, and shows that discriminability is confounded by item difficulty unless a within‑question estimator is used. A non‑intervening probe demonstrates that discriminability is at chance near the competence floor, rises above it, and that the diagnostic can predict gating errors in closed‑loop experiments.
The paper introduces PRISMS, a framework that uses expert pairwise rankings of varying fidelity to curate scientific designs without relying on data-intensive regression models. By escalating queries from lower- to higher-fidelity rankers based on Fisher-information, PRISMS improves discovery recall and reduces the number of screening rounds compared to regression-only and non‑escalated ranking methods. In optimization tasks, PRISMS outperforms Bayesian optimization by achieving higher hypervolume.
arXiv:2607. 10139v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the correct answer from a pool of candidate reasoning chains is the engine of test-time scaling, yet the standard selectors each carry a cost: self-consistency inherits the errors of the single model it resamples, and trained reward models need labeled data and transfer poorly off-distribution.
arXiv:2606. 15493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services.