Alisia Lupidi, Yonatan Gideoni, Dulhan Jayalath
Most investigations into double descent have focused on supervised models while the few works studying self-supervised settings find a surprising lack of the phenomenon. These results imply that double descent may not exist in self-supervised models. We show this empirically using a standard and linear autoencoder, two previously unstudied settings. The test loss is found to have either a classical U-shape or to monotonically decrease instead of exhibiting a double-descent curve. We hope that further work on this will help elucidate the theoretical underpinnings of this phenomenon.
Yuan He, Bailan He, Zifeng Ding, Alisia Lupidi, Yuqicheng Zhu, Shuo Chen, Caiqi Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen, Yunpu Ma, Volker Tresp, Ian Horrocks
Understanding and mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring reliable content generation. While previous research has primarily focused on "when" LLMs hallucinate, our work explains "why" and directly links model behaviour to the pre-training data that forms their prior knowledge. Specifically, we demonstrate that an asymmetry exists in the recognition of logically equivalent facts, which can be attributed to frequency discrepancies of entities appearing as subjects versus objects. Given that most pre-training datasets are inaccessible, we leverage the fully open-source OLMo series by indexing its Dolma dataset to estimate entity frequencies. Using relational facts (represented as triples) from Wikidata5M, we construct probing datasets to isolate this effect. Our experiments reveal that facts with a high-frequency subject and a low-frequency object are better recognised than their inverse, despite their logical equivalence. The pattern reverses in low-to-high frequency settings, and no statistically significant asymmetry emerges when both entities are high-frequency. These findings highlight the influential role of pre-training data in shaping model predictions and provide insights for inferring the characteristics of pre-training data in closed or partially closed LLMs.
Alisia Lupidi, Bhavul Gauri, Thomas Simon Foster, Bassel Al Omari, Despoina Magka, Alberto Pepe, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Muna Aghamelu, Nicolas Baldwin, Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Chee Hau Leow, Sandra Lefdal, Hossam Mossalam, Abhinav Moudgil, Saba Nazir, Emanuel Tewolde, Isabel Urrego, Jordi Armengol Estape, Amar Budhiraja, Gaurav Chaurasia, Abhishek Charnalia, Derek Dunfield, Karen Hambardzumyan, Daniel Izcovich, Martin Josifoski, Ishita Mediratta, Kelvin Niu, Parth Pathak, Michael Shvartsman, Edan Toledo, Anton Protopopov, Roberta Raileanu, Alexander Miller, Tatiana Shavrina, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach
LLM agents hold significant promise for advancing scientific research. To accelerate this progress, we introduce AIRS-Bench (the AI Research Science Benchmark), a suite of 20 tasks sourced from state-of-the-art machine learning papers. These tasks span diverse domains, including language modeling, mathematics, bioinformatics, and time series forecasting. AIRS-Bench tasks assess agentic capabilities over the full research lifecycle -- including idea generation, experiment analysis and iterative refinement -- without providing baseline code. The AIRS-Bench task format is versatile, enabling easy integration of new tasks and rigorous comparison across different agentic frameworks. We establish baselines using frontier models paired with both sequential and parallel scaffolds. Our results show that agents exceed human SOTA in four tasks but fail to match it in sixteen others. Even when agents surpass human benchmarks, they do not reach the theoretical performance ceiling for the underlying tasks. These findings indicate that AIRS-Bench is far from saturated and offers substantial room for improvement. We open-source the AIRS-Bench task definitions and evaluation code to catalyze further development in autonomous scientific research.
Bingchen Zhao, Despoina Magka, Minqi Jiang, Xian Li, Roberta Raileanu, Tatiana Shavrina, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Kelvin Niu, Shagun Sodhani, Michael Shvartsman, Andrei Lupu, Alisia Lupidi, Edan Toledo, Karen Hambardzumyan, Martin Josifoski, Thomas Foster, Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Abhishek Charnalia, Derek Dunfield, Alexander H. Miller, Oisin Mac Aodha, Jakob Foerster, Yoram Bachrach
Rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have the potential to assist in scientific progress. A critical capability toward this endeavor is the ability to reproduce existing work. To evaluate the ability of AI agents to reproduce results in an active research area, we introduce the Automated LLM Speedrunning Benchmark, leveraging the research community contributions on the NanoGPT speedrun, a competition to train a GPT-2 model in the shortest time. Each of the 19 speedrun tasks provides the agent with the previous records training script, optionally paired with one of three hint formats, ranging from pseudocode to paper-like descriptions of the new records improvements. Records execute quickly by design and speedrun improvements encompass diverse code-level changes, ranging from high-level algorithmic advancements to hardware-aware optimizations. These features make the benchmark both accessible and realistic for the frontier problem of improving LLM training. We find that recent reasoning LLMs combined with SoTA scaffolds struggle to reimplement already-known innovations in our benchmark, even when given detailed hints. Our benchmark thus provides a simple, non-saturated measure of an LLMs ability to automate scientific reproduction, a necessary (but not sufficient) skill for an autonomous research agent.
Alisia Lupidi, Carlos Gemmell, Nicola Cancedda, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Jason Weston, Jakob Foerster, Roberta Raileanu, Maria Lomeli
Synthetic data generation has recently emerged as a promising approach for enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) without the need for expensive human annotations. However, existing methods often generate data that can be low quality or contrived. In this paper, we introduce Source2Synth, a scalable approach for synthetic data generation and curation that is grounded in real-world data sources. Source2Synth takes as input a custom data source and produces synthetic data examples with intermediate reasoning steps. Our method improves the dataset quality by discarding low-quality generations based on their answerability. We demonstrate the generality of this approach by applying it to two tasks that leverage two different types of data: multi-hop question answering (MHQA), where we test complex reasoning abilities leveraging documents, and tabular question answering (TQA), where we test tool usage leveraging tables. Our method improves performance by 25.51% for TQA on WikiSQL and 22.57% for MHQA on HotpotQA compared to the fine-tuned baselines.
Karen Hambardzumyan, Nicolas Baldwin, Edan Toledo, Rishi Hazra, Michael Kuchnik, Bassel Al Omari, Thomas Simon Foster, Anton Protopopov, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Ishita Mediratta, Kelvin Niu, Michael Shvartsman, Alisia Lupidi, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Parth Pathak, Tatiana Shavrina, Despoina Magka, Hela Momand, Derek Dunfield, Nicola Cancedda, Pontus Stenetorp, Carole-Jean Wu, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster, Yoram Bachrach, Martin Josifoski
Existing research has identified three structural performance bottlenecks in AI research agents: (1) synchronous single-GPU execution constrains sample throughput, limiting the benefit of search; (2) a generalization gap where validation-based selection causes overfitting and performance to degrade over extended search horizons; and (3) the limited capability of fixed, single-turn LLM operators imposes a ceiling on search performance. We introduce AIRA$_2$, which addresses these bottlenecks through three architectural choices: an asynchronous multi-GPU worker pool that increases experiment throughput linearly; a Hidden Consistent Evaluation protocol that delivers a reliable evaluation signal; and ReAct agents that dynamically scope their actions and debug interactively. On MLE-bench-30, AIRA$^{\dagger}_{2}$ achieves a mean Percentile Rank of 81.5% at 24 hours and 83.1% at 72 hours, outperforming the strongest baseline, which achieves 72.7%. On AIRS-Bench, AIRA$_2$ exceeds human state-of-the-art on 6 out of 20 diverse research tasks. Ablations confirm that each architectural component is necessary, that performance follows a predictable scaling law that transfers across LLM backbones, and that the "overfitting" reported in prior work was driven by evaluation noise rather than true data memorization.
Francesco Giannini, Stefano Fioravanti, Oguzhan Keskin, Alisia Maria Lupidi, Lucie Charlotte Magister, Pietro Lio, Pietro Barbiero
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) recently empowered researchers to investigate hard mathematical problems which eluded traditional approaches for decades. Yet, the use of AI in Universal Algebra (UA) -- one of the fields laying the foundations of modern mathematics -- is still completely unexplored. This work proposes the first use of AI to investigate UA's conjectures with an equivalent equational and topological characterization. While topological representations would enable the analysis of such properties using graph neural networks, the limited transparency and brittle explainability of these models hinder their straightforward use to empirically validate existing conjectures or to formulate new ones. To bridge these gaps, we propose a general algorithm generating AI-ready datasets based on UA's conjectures, and introduce a novel neural layer to build fully interpretable graph networks. The results of our experiments demonstrate that interpretable graph networks: (i) enhance interpretability without sacrificing task accuracy, (ii) strongly generalize when predicting universal algebra's properties, (iii) generate simple explanations that empirically validate existing conjectures, and (iv) identify subgraphs suggesting the formulation of novel conjectures.
Edan Toledo, Karen Hambardzumyan, Martin Josifoski, Rishi Hazra, Nicolas Baldwin, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Michael Kuchnik, Despoina Magka, Minqi Jiang, Alisia Maria Lupidi, Andrei Lupu, Roberta Raileanu, Kelvin Niu, Tatiana Shavrina, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Michael Shvartsman, Shagun Sodhani, Alexander H. Miller, Abhishek Charnalia, Derek Dunfield, Carole-Jean Wu, Pontus Stenetorp, Nicola Cancedda, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster, Yoram Bachrach
AI research agents are demonstrating great potential to accelerate scientific progress by automating the design, implementation, and training of machine learning models. We focus on methods for improving agents' performance on MLE-bench, a challenging benchmark where agents compete in Kaggle competitions to solve real-world machine learning problems. We formalize AI research agents as search policies that navigate a space of candidate solutions, iteratively modifying them using operators. By designing and systematically varying different operator sets and search policies (Greedy, MCTS, Evolutionary), we show that their interplay is critical for achieving high performance. Our best pairing of search strategy and operator set achieves a state-of-the-art result on MLE-bench lite, increasing the success rate of achieving a Kaggle medal from 39.6% to 47.7%. Our investigation underscores the importance of jointly considering the search strategy, operator design, and evaluation methodology in advancing automated machine learning.