GraphBU is a new method for generating synthetic Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) instances using graph-native block units that explicitly encode how local subproblems couple to the rest of an instance. The approach achieves ~0.934 average graph-statistical similarity to source families, ~96.7% feasibility preservation, and ~8% improvement in downstream Predict-and-Search training performance. The work addresses a practical bottleneck in ML-for-combinatorial-optimization research: the scarcity of realistic MILP instances from private or proprietary pipelines.
GraphPO is a new reinforcement learning framework that represents reasoning rollouts as directed acyclic graphs rather than independent chains or trees, merging semantically equivalent reasoning paths into equivalence classes to share suffixes and reduce redundant exploration. The approach assigns efficiency advantages to incoming edges and correctness advantages to outgoing edges, deriving process supervision from outcome rewards. Experiments on three LLMs across reasoning and agentic search benchmarks show consistent improvements over chain- and tree-based baselines under equal token or response budgets. The method also provides theoretical guarantees on reduced advantage-estimation variance.
Researchers introduce PlanBench-XL, an interactive benchmark of 327 retail tasks spanning 1,665 tools designed to evaluate LLM agents on long-horizon planning under retrieval-limited tool visibility. The benchmark includes a blocking mechanism simulating real-world disruptions such as missing or failing tools, forcing agents to detect and recover from broken execution paths. Experiments on ten leading LLMs reveal severe performance degradation: GPT-5.4 drops from 51.90% accuracy in unblocked settings to 11.36% under the most severe blocking condition, highlighting fragility in adaptive planning for large, imperfect tool environments.
Researchers introduce Graph Sparse Sampling (GSS), an online planning algorithm for continuous Markov Decision Processes that shares sampled futures across candidate decisions rather than branching separately per action, eliminating the tree structure of methods like MCTS. The approach exposes large GPU-friendly batches and uses heuristics to focus computation, with finite-sample performance guarantees showing polynomial (rather than exponential) dependence on planning horizon under suitable conditions. Empirical results on continuous-control tasks show GSS substantially outperforms tree-based planners at long horizons. The work formalizes when shared-future graph planning can avoid the curse of the horizon that afflicts sparse sampling trees.
Researchers introduce PEEU (Planning Experience Exploration and Utilization), a training approach for small open-source multimodal LLMs that autonomously explores GUI environments to collect hindsight experience and synthesizes high-level training data for task planning. A 7B model trained with PEEU achieves 30.6% accuracy on real-world benchmarks, outperforming Qwen2.5-VL-32B. The paper also proposes TDHAF, a hierarchical analysis framework revealing that high-level task training yields stronger out-of-distribution generalization than mastering low-level atomic skills alone.
A new arXiv preprint unifies two major theoretical frameworks for frequentist RKHS bandits — Gaussian-process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) and decision-estimation-coefficient (DEC) methods — under a common algorithmic-information language called MAIR. The paper generalizes both the GP-UCB analysis and the MAMS algorithm, proposes a safeguarded master algorithm combining their advantages, and demonstrates that algorithmic complexity can be more informative than class-wide minimax certificates in overparameterized models. The work clarifies a foundational distinction between algorithmic information and minimax coefficients in bandit theory.
Researchers introduce Graph-as-Policy (GaP), a multi-agent coding harness that generates directed computation graphs combining perception, planning, and control nodes for robotic 'Variational Automation' tasks — those with high variation in object geometry and pose. GaP uses an internal simulation environment to rehearse and iteratively refine graph structures in parallel, improving success rates without relying solely on model-free policies. Evaluation across 8 new benchmarks (4 simulated, 4 real-world) shows significant outperformance over baselines. The work bridges agentic coding systems with interpretable robot programming and Task and Motion Planning.
The Grounded Integration Measure (GIM) is a new LLM benchmark of 820 original problems designed to resist benchmark saturation by requiring integration of multiple cognitive operations—constraint satisfaction, state tracking, epistemic vigilance, audience calibration—over broadly accessible knowledge. Unlike knowledge-escalation benchmarks (GPQA, HLE) or pure abstraction benchmarks (ARC-AGI), GIM grounds reasoning in realistic tasks without gating on specialized expertise. The authors calibrate a 2-parameter logistic IRT model over 200k+ prompt-response pairs across 28 models and 47 test configurations, producing the most extensive published study of test-time compute vs. model capability tradeoffs on a fixed benchmark. A key finding is that within-family configuration choices (thinking budget, quantization) matter as much as model selection.
OpenAI released optimized GPU kernels targeting block-sparse neural network architectures, claiming orders-of-magnitude speedups over cuBLAS and cuSPARSE depending on sparsity level. The kernels were applied to achieve state-of-the-art results in text sentiment analysis and generative modeling of text and images. This release represents an early infrastructure contribution toward efficient sparse computation in deep learning.