There have recently been new research trends in efficient discrete sampling and optimization. We are organizing this workshop with the goals of 1) syncing up on the latest research progress in discrete sampling and optimization, 2) discussing the limitations of current methods and brainstorming new algorithm paradigms, and 3) connecting to applications in domains such as language/protein modeling, physics simulation, and bio/chemical engineering---where improved techniques for sampling/optimization in discrete space could help---and exploring the gaps between the application's needs and the capabilities of existing methods. We hope this workshop will be an excellent opportunity for presenting and discussing new algorithms and applications with researchers and practitioners within or outside the domain of discrete sampling/optimization.
| Opening Remarks | |
| Yoshua Bengio: GFlowNets for Bayesian Inference (Invited Talk) | |
| Giacomo Zanella (Invited Talk) | |
| Contributed Talk 1 (Contributed Talk) | |
| Stefanie Jegelka: Learning discrete optimization: Loss functions and graph neural networks (Invited Talk) | |
| Coffee Break (Break) | |
| Poster Session 1 (Poster Session) | |
| Will Grathwohl: Recent Applications of Gradients in Discrete Sampling (Invited Talk) | |
| Lianhui Qin: Differentiable and structured text reasoning (Invited Talk) | |
| Contributed Talk 2 (Contributed Talk) | |
| Petar Veličković: The Melting Pot of Neural Algorithmic Reasoning (Invited Talk) | |
| Closing Remarks (Closing Remark) | |
| Poster Session 2 (Poster Session) | |
| GFlowNets for Causal Discovery: an Overview (Poster) | |
| Topological Neural Discrete Representation Learning à la Kohonen (Oral) | |
| Landscape Surrogate: Learning Decision Losses for Mathematical Optimization Under Partial Information (Poster) | |
| Efficient data selection employing Semantic Similarity-based Graph Structures for model training (Poster) | |
| Tackling Provably Hard Representative Selection viaGraph Neural Networks (Oral) | |
| Training Discrete EBMs with Energy Discrepancy (Poster) | |
| Finite-state Offline Reinforcement Learning with Moment-based Bayesian Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainties (Poster) | |
| Annealed Biological Sequence Optimization (Poster) | |
| Hierarchical Decomposition Framework for Feasibility-hard Combinatorial Optimization (Poster) | |
| Global Optimality in Bivariate Gradient-based DAG Learning (Poster) | |
| Strictly Low Rank Constraint Optimization \\ --- An Asymptotically $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{t^2})$ Method (Poster) | |
| Searching Large Neighborhoods for Integer Linear Programs with Contrastive Learning (Poster) | |
| Complex Preferences for Different Convergent Priors in Discrete Graph Diffusion (Poster) | |
| Sequential Attention for Feature Selection (Poster) | |
| Tensor Proxies for Efficient Feature Cross Search (Poster) | |
| Guided Evolution with Binary Predictors for ML Program Search (Poster) | |
| Discrete Diffusion Reward Guidance Methods for Offline Reinforcement Learning (Poster) | |
| Categorical SDEs with Simplex Diffusion (Poster) | |
| SOBER: Highly Parallel Bayesian Optimization and Bayesian Quadrature over Discrete and Mixed Spaces (Poster) | |
| Solving NP-hard Min-max Routing Problems as Sequential Generation with Equity Context (Poster) | |
| Optimizing protein fitness using Gibbs sampling with Graph-based Smoothing (Poster) | |
| Symmetric Exploration in Combinatorial Optimization is Free! (Poster) | |
| An Optimal Clustering Algorithm for the Labeled Stochastic Block Model (Poster) | |
| Reinforcement Learning for Sampling on Temporal Medical Imaging Sequences (Poster) | |
| Differentiable Search of Evolutionary Trees (Poster) | |
| Diffusion on the Probability Simplex (Poster) | |
| DISCS: A Benchmark for Discrete Sampling (Poster) | |
| Sequential Monte Carlo Steering of Large Language Models using Probabilistic Programs (Oral) | |
| Constrained Sampling of Discrete Geometric Manifolds using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (Poster) | |
| Accelerating Diffusion-based Combinatorial Optimization Solvers by Progressive Distillation (Oral) | |
| SurCo: Learning Linear SURrogates for COmbinatorial Nonlinear Optimization Problems (Oral) | |
| Can LLMs Generate Random Numbers? Evaluating LLM Sampling in Controlled Domains (Poster) | |
| Protein Design with Guided Discrete Diffusion (Poster) | |
| Efficient Location Sampling Algorithms for Road Networks (Poster) | |
| Towards Accelerating Benders Decomposition via Reinforcement Learning Surrogate Models (Poster) | |
| Understanding prompt engineering does not require rethinking generalization (Oral) | |