fluid-search-d6e09840·1 events·first seen Aliases: fluid search
A new arXiv paper argues that autonomous research (AR) systems should be evaluated not only on final outcome quality but also on search efficiency — how quickly they reach good solutions within a fixed evaluation budget. The authors propose using the AUC of the Pareto frontier as an efficiency metric and compare hill climbing, beam search, tree search, and evolutionary search across twelve systems-optimization tasks, finding no single algorithm dominates. They introduce 'fluid search,' a portfolio bandit method that dynamically allocates budget across a forest of search processes, achieving oracle-level efficiency without knowing the best search structure in advance.