papers

Publications (22)

cs.CL2026

ReproRepo: Scaling Reproducibility Audits with GitHub Repository Issues

Shanda Li, Qiuhong Anna Wei, Jingwu Tang +5

Reproducing research results from papers and released code is central to scientific progress. Existing works have introduced benchmarks to evaluate whether LLM agents can assist wi…

cs.LG2026

CodePDE: An Inference Framework for LLM-driven PDE Solver Generation

Shanda Li, Tanya Marwah, Junhong Shen +4

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are fundamental to modeling physical systems, yet solving them remains a complex challenge. Traditional numerical solvers rely on expert knowl…

math.CO2026

Settling the Optimal Exponent Relating Sumsets and Difference Sets

Haowei Lin, Shanda Li

The authors construct explicit finite subsets of the integers showing that the exponent 1/2 in the classical sum‑difference inequality cannot be improved, proving it is optimal.

#additive combinatorics#sumsets#difference sets#extremal combinatorics
cs.AI2026

Human agency in initial human-AI proof formalization workflows

Katherine M. Collins, Simon Frieder, Jonas Bayer +14

For centuries, human mathematicians have written proofs to substantiate their mathematical arguments; yet, the ability to automatically verify the validity of proofs has long been…

cs.SE2026

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

Mike A. Merrill, Alexander G. Shaw, Nicholas Carlini +82

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…

cs.LG2024

Functional Interpolation for Relative Positions Improves Long Context Transformers

Shanda Li, Chong You, Guru Guruganesh +7

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. Thou…

cs.LG2026

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

Shengyu Feng, Weiwei Sun, Shanda Li +2

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 cap…

cs.AI2026

CoMind: Towards Community-Driven Agents for Machine Learning Engineering

Sijie Li, Weiwei Sun, Shanda Li +2

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,…

cs.LG2021

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

Shengjie Luo, Shanda Li, Tianle Cai +6

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…

cs.AI2025

Inference Scaling Laws: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal Inference for Problem-Solving with Language Models

Yangzhen Wu, Zhiqing Sun, Shanda Li +2

While the scaling laws of large language models (LLMs) training have been extensively studied, optimal inference configurations of LLMs remain underexplored. We study inference sca…

cs.LG2022

Your Transformer May Not be as Powerful as You Expect

Shengjie Luo, Shanda Li, Shuxin Zheng +3

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…

cs.CL2026

Scaling Latent Reasoning via Looped Language Models

Rui-Jie Zhu, Zixuan Wang, Kai Hua +30

Modern LLMs are trained to "think" primarily via explicit text generation, such as chain-of-thought (CoT), which defers reasoning to post-training and under-leverages pre-training…

cs.LG2026

Learn Hard Problems During RL with Reference Guided Fine-tuning

Yangzhen Wu, Shanda Li, Zixin Wen +5

Reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning can suffer from reward sparsity: for challenging problems, LLM fails to sample any correct trajectories, preventing RL from r…

cs.CV2021

Can Vision Transformers Perform Convolution?

Shanda Li, Xiangning Chen, Di He +1

Several recent studies have demonstrated that attention-based networks, such as Vision Transformer (ViT), can outperform Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on several computer vi…

cs.CL2025

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

Weiwei Sun, Shengyu Feng, Shanda Li +1

Although LLM-based agents have attracted significant attention in domains such as software engineering and machine learning research, their role in advancing combinatorial optimiza…

cs.LG2025

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

Shanda Li, Shinjae Yoo, Yiming Yang

Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) offer a principled approach for solving complex partial differential equations (PDEs). However, scaling them to handle more complex PDEs requires in…

cs.LG2025

Sample Complexity and Representation Ability of Test-time Scaling Paradigms

Baihe Huang, Shanda Li, Tianhao Wu +5

Test-time scaling paradigms have significantly advanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks. Despite their empirical success, theoretical understandin…

cs.LG2023

Learning Physics-Informed Neural Networks without Stacked Back-propagation

Di He, Shanda Li, Wenlei Shi +5

Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) has become a commonly used machine learning approach to solve partial differential equations (PDE). But, facing high-dimensional secondorder…

cs.LG2024

Learning a Fourier Transform for Linear Relative Positional Encodings in Transformers

Krzysztof Marcin Choromanski, Shanda Li, Valerii Likhosherstov +7

We propose a new class of linear Transformers called FourierLearner-Transformers (FLTs), which incorporate a wide range of relative positional encoding mechanisms (RPEs). These inc…

cs.LG2022

Is Physics-Informed Loss Always Suitable for Training Physics-Informed Neural Network?

Chuwei Wang, Shanda Li, Di He +1

The Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) approach is a new and promising way to solve partial differential equations using deep learning. The Physics-Informed Loss is the d…

cs.LG2026

Spend Less, Fit Better: Budget-Efficient Scaling Law Fitting via Active Experiment Selection

Sijie Li, Shanda Li, Haowei Lin +3

Scaling laws are used to plan multi-million-dollar training runs, but fitting those laws can itself cost millions. In modern large-scale workflows, assembling a sufficiently inform…

cs.LG2025

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

Haowei Lin, Shanda Li, Haotian Ye +4

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…