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Shanda Li

14 accepted papers

2026

CO-Bench: Benchmarking Language Model Agents in Algorithm Search for Combinatorial Optimization

AAAI 2026technical

Although LLM-based agents have attracted significant attention in domains such as software engineering and machine learning research, their role in advancing combinatorial optimization (CO) remains relatively underexplored. This gap underscores the need for a deeper understanding of their potential

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

CoMind: Towards Community-Driven Agents for Machine Learning Engineering

ICLR 2026poster

Large language model (LLM) agents show promise in automating machine learning (ML) engineering. However, existing agents typically operate in isolation on a given research problem, without engaging with the broader research community, where human researchers often gain insights and contribute by sha…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

FrontierCO: Real-World and Large-Scale Evaluation of Machine Learning Solvers for Combinatorial Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

Machine learning (ML) has shown promise for tackling combinatorial optimization (CO), but much of the reported progress relies on small-scale, synthetic benchmarks that fail to capture real-world structure and scale. A core limitation is that ML methods are typically trained and evaluated on synthet…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Sample Complexity and Representation Ability of Test-time Scaling Paradigms

ICLR 2026poster

Test-time scaling paradigms have significantly advanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks. Despite their empirical success, theoretical understanding of the sample efficiency of various test-time strategies---such as self-consistency, best-of-$n$, and self-correction-…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfaces

ICLR 2026poster

AI agents may soon become capable of autonomously completing valuable, long-horizon tasks in diverse domains. Current benchmarks either do not measure real-world tasks, or are not sufficiently difficult to meaningfully measure frontier models. To this end, we present Terminal-Bench 1.5: a carefully…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Inference Scaling Laws: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal Inference for LLM Problem-Solving

ICLR 2025poster

While the scaling laws of large language models (LLMs) training have been extensively studied, optimal inference configurations of LLMs remain underexplored. We study inference scaling laws (aka test-time scaling laws) and compute-optimal inference, focusing on the trade-offs between model sizes an…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2025

Maximum Update Parametrization and Zero-Shot Hyperparameter Transfer for Fourier Neural Operators

ICML 2025poster

Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) offer a principled approach for solving complex partial differential equations (PDEs). However, scaling them to handle more complex PDEs requires increasing the number of Fourier modes, which significantly expands the number of model parameters and makes hyperparamete…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

TFG-Flow: Training-free Guidance in Multimodal Generative Flow

ICLR 2025poster

Given an unconditional generative model and a predictor for a target property (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. As a highly efficient technique for steering generative models toward flexible o…

2024

Functional Interpolation for Relative Positions improves Long Context Transformers

ICLR 2024poster

Preventing the performance decay of Transformers on inputs longer than those used for training has been an important challenge in extending the context length of these models. Though the Transformer architecture has fundamentally no limits on the input sequence lengths it can process, the choice of…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning a Fourier Transform for Linear Relative Positional Encodings in Transformers

AISTATS 2024poster

We propose a new class of linear Transformers called FourierLearner-Transformers (FLTs), which incorporate a wide range of relative positional encoding mechanisms (RPEs). These include regular RPE techniques applied for sequential data, as well as novel RPEs operating on geometric data embedded in h…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

Learning Physics-Informed Neural Networks without Stacked Back-propagation

AISTATS 2023poster

Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) has become a commonly used machine learning approach to solve partial differential equations (PDE). But, facing high-dimensional secondorder PDE problems, PINN will suffer from severe scalability issues since its loss includes second-order derivatives, the comp…

2022

Is $L^2$ Physics Informed Loss Always Suitable for Training Physics Informed Neural Network?

NeurIPS 2022accept

The Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) approach is a new and promising way to solve partial differential equations using deep learning. The $L^2$ Physics-Informed Loss is the de-facto standard in training Physics-Informed Neural Networks. In this paper, we challenge this common practice by inves…

2022

Your Transformer May Not be as Powerful as You Expect

NeurIPS 2022accept

Relative Positional Encoding (RPE), which encodes the relative distance between any pair of tokens, is one of the most successful modifications to the original Transformer. As far as we know, theoretical understanding of the RPE-based Transformers is largely unexplored. In this work, we mathematical…

2021

Stable, Fast and Accurate: Kernelized Attention with Relative Positional Encoding

NeurIPS 2021poster

The attention module, which is a crucial component in Transformer, cannot scale efficiently to long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Many works focus on approximating the dot-then-exponentiate softmax function in the original attention, leading to sub-quadratic or even linear-complexity Tr…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar