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Dongdong Ge

Publications and source records attributed to Dongdong Ge.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Beyond Verified Answers: Solver-Informed Self-Distillation for Bootstrapping Operations Research Language Models

Modern large language models (LLMs) can translate natural-language descriptions into operations research (OR) formulations. Post-training techniques including reinforcement learning and on-policy self-distillation have further improved this capability. However, three limitations remain in training LLMs for OR formulations. First, training commonly relies on synthetic formulations validated by human experts or stronger models, constraining scalable supervision. Second, credit assignment is either coarse or costly: outcome rewards score an entire trajectory without locating the responsible modeling decision, whereas process-level supervision requires an additional evaluator. Third, privileged self-distillation can induce style mismatch by using solver context unavailable at deployment. We find that a model can improve from solver-artifact feedback generated by its own rollouts, making self-distillation a practical, evaluator-free source of dense supervision. Therefore, we propose SOLID: Solver-Informed On-Policy LearnIng through Self-Distillation, a novel framework for self-improving OR language models without verified answers or external evaluators. SOLID executes candidate programs from multiple rollouts, clusters their objectives, and selects a majority-group artifact as a pseudo-reference. The model then performs updates using group-relative advantages and dense self-supervision signals. Across multiple OR benchmarks, SOLID improves solution accuracy for both general-purpose and OR-tuned models over outcome-only group-relative training. These results show that solver artifacts can support scalable self-improvement without trusted answers.

math.OC

Ask Before You Optimize: Dynamic Pre-Formulation Clarification for Interactive Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to formulate optimization models from natural-language problem descriptions, yet realistic operations research (OR) requests are often incomplete: missing objectives, constraints, or business rules can change the resulting mathematical program. Existing evaluations largely assume a complete specification and therefore overlook whether an agent knows when clarification is needed before modeling. We introduce OR-Clarify, a benchmark for pre-formulation clarification. Each task presents a partial public problem description, withholds structured hidden slots, and evaluates agents through bounded interaction with a simulated user. The benchmark supports both openended and choice-based clarification, and measures slot recovery, stopping behavior, silent assumptions, and interaction cost. We further propose Interactive Optimization (InterOPT), a two-stage framework that identifies unresolved formulation-critical gaps and uses them to guide whether to ask the next question or to stop. In our choice-based experiments, InterOPT substantially outperforms all baselines in exact slot recovery; in the open-ended setting, it remains competitive with strong prior methods. Together, OR-Clarify and InterOPT reframe OR assistance as a selective completeness decision: clarify when needed, stop when ready, and quantify what remains missing.

math.OC

Skill2Query: Exploiting Skill Structure to Generate Pseudo-Queries for Agent Skill Retrieval

Pseudo-query generation can alleviate the supervision bottleneck for agent skill retrieval, but existing document-level approaches typically leave the rich internal relations among capabilities, parameters, and usage examples implicit. As a result, generated queries may be topically relevant to a skill while lacking capability grounding and parameter consistency, raising the question of whether explicitly exploiting a skill document's internal structure can produce more effective retrieval signals. We therefore propose Skill2Query, a framework that first parses a skill document into a Skill Knowledge Graph and then generates pseudo-queries through a three-stage process including style mimicking, query template generation, and parameter filling. The generated queries can be used for offline index augmentation, online query expansion, and retriever training. Four benchmarks (TheoremQA, LogicBench, ToolQA, and CHAMP) are used to evaluate Skill2Query with large-scale skill candidate pools across multiple downstream applications, including skill retrieval, retriever training, and end-to-end agent execution. Using nearly 30K skills across diverse domains, we generate 700K category-diverse pseudo-queries. Skill2Query consistently improves sparse, dense, and skill-routing retrieval, with an average Recall@1 gain of 6.70 percentage points across retrieval settings. Skill2Query-generated training data also achieves the best Recall@1 and nDCG@1 among the evaluated generation baselines. Further evaluations with multiple LLM backends demonstrate that improved skill retrieval translates into higher agent task success rates. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/MatZaharia/Skill2Query.

cs.CL

GPU-Accelerated Conic Quadratic Programming with Local Linear Convergence under Strict Complementarity

We present PDHCG-CQP, a GPU-accelerated first-order solver for large-scale conic convex quadratic programming. PDHCG-CQP supports affine constraints and Cartesian products of nonnegative, second-order, rotated second-order, exponential, and three-dimensional power cones. At its core is a restarted averaged primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method, whose primal update is computed inexactly by solving a conic quadratic proximal subproblem with projected gradient iterations. We establish local linear convergence of the restarted averaged scheme with both exact and inexact primal proximal evaluations under a uniform local quadratic-growth condition on the smoothed primal-dual gap. We further show that this condition holds under strict complementarity by exploiting a rotated second-order-cone lifting together with local primal and dual regularity conditions. Our C/CUDA implementation combines matrix-free linear algebra, batched cone projections, adaptive inner solves, reflected-Halpern acceleration, and fully device-resident KKT residual computations. It also supports multi-GPU execution through a two-dimensional partitioning of the problem data. Extensive experiments on standard and large-scale quadratic programming (QP), convex quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP), second-order cone programming (SOCP), and quasilinear Fisher equilibrium benchmarks demonstrate that PDHCG-CQP achieves state-of-the-art robustness among first-order solvers while scaling efficiently to 8 GPUs and instances with up to $4.4\times10^8$ stored primal coordinates. PDHCG-CQP is open source and available at https://github.com/Lhongpei/PDHCG.

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A Curvature-Aware Rank-Adaptive Distributed Augmented-Lagrangian Solver for Large-Scale SDPs

We present CARDAL (Curvature-Aware Rank-Adaptive Distributed Augmented Lagrangian), a distributed multi-GPU solver for large-scale semidefinite programs (SDPs) based on a rank-adaptive Burer-Monteiro factorization and an augmented Lagrangian method. At fixed ranks, a matrix-free L-BFGS method with negative-curvature corrections targets an approximate Euclidean second-order stationary point of the factored augmented Lagrangian. A reverse multiplier shift turns a negative dual-slack direction into exact negative curvature after rank expansion, and a small joint rank-lift problem selects a batched low-rank correction. A verified slack lower bound provides an a posteriori approximate KKT certificate. Our analysis establishes generic global-optimality guarantees for heterogeneous products of PSD cones at per-block ranks near the Barvinok-Pataki scale, together with a finite-accuracy counterpart under blockwise cost smoothing. For scalable execution, CARDAL distributes constraint rows, factor columns, and PSD blocks over a Constraint x Rank x Cone device mesh. The primal residual, gradient, Hessian-vector products, and slack matrix-vector products are evaluated using device-local operations and axis-wise collectives. On the Mittelmann benchmark, CARDAL exhibits stronger robustness than existing low-rank GPU approaches under a uniform accuracy standard. Experiments on large-scale SDP relaxations from robotics, electronic structure, and Max-Cut demonstrate the complementary scaling regimes of the three distribution axes, with observed wall-clock speedups of up to 4x on four H100 GPUs.

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DynaKRAG: A Unified Framework for Learnable Evidence Control in Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multi-hop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) acquires evidence sequentially, with each document contributing supporting facts, bridge entities, query refinements, or sufficient evidence for answering. Evidence acquisition can involve iterative retrieval, query reformulation, evidence assessment, and sufficiency checking. We introduce DynaKRAG, a unified evidence-action framework that learns a shared state-conditioned policy for coordinating these operations. At each step, a deterministic validity layer constructs the executable action set, a learned continuation gate selects between answer generation and further evidence acquisition, and a learned advantage scorer ranks feasible evidence operations by their predicted gain relative to immediate answer generation. The selected operation updates the shared state and may enable additional operations. Across HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and MuSiQue with Qwen2.5-7B, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.1-8B, DynaKRAG ranks first among the compared methods in both EM and F1 for all nine dataset--backbone pairs. Relative to matched-backbone baseline method, DynaKRAG improves F1 in every pair while achieving total-token efficiency gains of 10.1--34.3\% and retrieval-call efficiency gains of 15.1--43.4\%, establishing Pareto dominance under these measures. With Qwen2.5-7B, terminal evidence compression further improves answer quality across all three datasets while reducing the context passed to final answer generation by 54.4\%--71.5\%. These results demonstrate that unified, state-conditioned evidence control supports strong answer quality, efficient retrieval, and compact answer-generation contexts.

cs.CL

GraphBU: MILP Instance Generation with Graph-Native Block Units

Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) instances used for solver development are hard to obtain when models come from private or application-specific pipelines. A generator must keep the structure that solvers and learned policies rely on. Existing general generators usually choose their generation unit from a formulation template, summary statistics, local graph edits, or blocks found after recombination. These units do not explicitly record how a local part of the MILP is coupled to the rest of the instance. We propose GraphBU, a graph-native generator whose basic unit is a local subproblem plus its interface. The method promotes coupling nodes into master constraints or boundary variables and uses the resulting block units for compatibility-checked replacement. The analysis focuses on the properties needed by this construction: promotion separates interfaces, replacement can preserve feasibility under an interface-slack condition, and the graph construction is invariant to row-column permutations. On MILP instances generation, this unit keeps graph statistics close to the source family, preserves feasibility on most datasets, and improves downstream Predict-and-Search training. Genrated by GraphBU, The average graph-statistical similarity was approximately 0.934, the average feasibility was approximately 96.7%, and the average increase in the main index of downstream PS was approximately 8.0%.

cs.LG

OR-Space: A Full-Lifecycle Workspace Benchmark for Industrial Optimization Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used to assist with operations research (OR) modeling, yet existing OR-oriented benchmarks often reduce evaluation to one-shot translation from a self-contained problem statement into a mathematical formulation or solver program. Such settings abstract away two characteristics of real industrial OR workflows: persistent multi-artifact workspaces and multi-stage task lifecycles. We introduce OR-Space, a full-lifecycle workspace benchmark for evaluating industrial optimization agents across model construction, model revision, and grounded explanation. Each instance is an executable workspace containing business documents, structured data, optional code artifacts, solver outputs, and task-specific evaluators distributed across interdependent files. OR-Space defines three task modes: Build, where agents construct solver-ready optimization models from heterogeneous artifacts; Revise, where agents modify existing models under changing requirements or solver feedback while preserving valid prior logic; and Explain, where agents answer grounded questions about solutions, constraints, and business implications using evidence spread across workspace artifacts. By combining persistent workspaces with lifecycle-oriented tasks, OR-Space evaluates whether agents can perform reliable optimization work beyond end-to-end text generation. We describe the benchmark design, evaluation protocol, and quality-control pipeline, and position OR-Space as a benchmark for studying the reliability, failure modes, and practical readiness of LLM agents in industrial OR workflows.

cs.AI

OSDN: Improving Delta Rule with Provable Online Preconditioning in Linear Attention

Linear attention and state-space models offer constant-memory alternatives to softmax attention, but often struggle with in-context associative recall. The Delta Rule mitigates this by writing each token via one step of online gradient descent. However, its step size relies on a single scalar gate that ignores the feature-wise curvature of the inner objective. We propose Online Scaled DeltaNet (OSDN), which augments the scalar gate with a diagonal preconditioner updated online via hypergradient feedback. Crucially, this right-preconditioning is algebraically equivalent to a per-feature scaling of the write-side key. This equivalence allows OSDN to strictly preserve the hardware-friendly chunkwise parallel pipeline of DeltaNet without incurring high-dimensional state overhead. Theoretically, by exploiting the exact-quadratic structure of the inner regression loss, we establish super-geometric convergence against a right-Newton comparator and prove an algorithm-aligned token-local residual contraction bound. To handle non-stationary contexts, we further introduce Adaptive Preconditioner Forgetting (APF) to dynamically refresh stale calibration. Empirically, OSDN demonstrates strong performance across scales. At the 340M-parameter scale, OSDN improves JRT-style in-context recall by 32% over DeltaNet. Scaling to 1.3B parameters, it achieves a 39% reduction in the recall residual ratio while maintaining parity on general downstream tasks (e.g., perplexity and LongBench) -- demonstrating that our online-preconditioning mechanism effectively transfers and amplifies at the billion-parameter scale.

cs.LG

From Soliloquy to Agora: Memory-Enhanced LLM Agents with Decentralized Debate for Optimization Modeling

Optimization modeling underpins real-world decision-making in logistics, manufacturing, energy, and public services, but reliably solving such problems from natural-language requirements remains challenging for current large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose \emph{Agora-Opt}, a modular agentic framework for optimization modeling that combines decentralized debate with a read-write memory bank. Agora-Opt allows multiple agent teams to independently produce end-to-end solutions and reconcile them through an outcome-grounded debate protocol, while memory stores solver-verified artifacts and past disagreement resolutions to support training-free improvement over time. This design is flexible across both backbones and methods: it reduces base-model lock-in, transfers across different LLM families, and can be layered onto existing pipelines with minimal coupling. Across public benchmarks, Agora-Opt achieves the strongest overall performance among all compared methods, outperforming strong zero-shot LLMs, training-centric approaches, and prior agentic baselines. Further analyses show robust gains across backbone choices and component variants, and demonstrate that decentralized debate offers a structural advantage over centralized selection by enabling agents to refine candidate solutions through interaction and even recover correct formulations when all initial candidates are flawed. These results suggest that reliable optimization modeling benefits from combining collaborative cross-checking with reusable experience, and position Agora-Opt as a practical and extensible foundation for trustworthy optimization modeling assistance. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CHIANGEL/Agora-Opt.

math.OC

A Technical Note on the Implementation and Use of PDCS

This technical note documents the implementation and use of the Primal-Dual Conic Programming Solver (PDCS), a first-order solver for large-scale conic optimization problems introduced by Lin et al. (arXiv:2505.00311). It describes the algorithmic and implementation details underlying PDCS, including the restarted primal-dual hybrid gradient method framework, adaptive step-size selection, adaptive reflected Halpern iterations, adaptive restarts, and diagonal preconditioning. It also provides practical instructions for using PDCS, including its interfaces with JuMP and CVXPY, solver options, and illustrative code examples. PDCS is available at https://github.com/ZikaiXiong/PDCS under the Apache License 2.0.

math.OC

PDHCG-II: An Enhanced Version of PDHCG for Large-Scale Convex QP

Quadratic programming (QP) is a fundamental optimization model with wide-ranging applications in decision-making and machine learning, yet efficiently solving large-scale instances remains a major computational challenge. Building upon the recently developed PDHCG framework, we propose PDHCG-II, an enhanced first-order solver tailored for large-scale convex QPs. The proposed method explicitly exploits the quadratic structure of the objective and incorporates several key algorithmic innovations, including Halpern-type acceleration and a PID-controlled adaptive update of the primal-dual weight. To further improve practical performance, PDHCG-II introduces a refined adaptive termination criterion for inner subproblems to prevent over-solving, together with an infeasibility detection mechanism for robust handling of ill-posed instances. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that PDHCG-II consistently achieves 2.5-5 times speedups over PDHCG on standard QP benchmarks. To facilitate reproducibility and broader adoption, we release a CUDA-C implementation of PDHCG-II as open-source software.

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MoE-SpAc: Efficient MoE Inference Based on Speculative Activation Utility in Heterogeneous Edge Scenarios

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable scalable performance but face severe memory constraints on edge devices. Existing offloading strategies struggle with I/O bottlenecks due to the dynamic, low-information nature of autoregressive expert activation. In this paper, we propose to repurpose Speculative Decoding (SD) not merely as a compute accelerator, but as an informative lookahead sensor for memory management, supported by our theoretical and empirical analyses. Hence, we introduce MoE-SpAc, an MoE inference framework that integrates a Speculative Utility Estimator to track expert demand, a Heterogeneous Workload Balancer to dynamically partition computation via online integer optimization, and an Asynchronous Execution Engine to unify the prefetching and eviction in the same utility space. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that MoE-SpAc achieves a 42% improvement in TPS over the SOTA SD-based baseline, and an average 4.04x speedup over all standard baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/lshAlgorithm/MoE-SpAc .

cs.LG

D-PDLP: Scaling PDLP to Distributed Multi-GPU Systems

We present a distributed framework of the Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient (PDHG) algorithm for solving massive-scale linear programming (LP) problems. Although PDHG-based solvers demonstrate strong performance on single-node GPU architectures, their applicability to industrial-scale instances is often limited by single-GPU computational throughput. To overcome these challenges, we propose D-PDLP, the first Distributed PDLP framework, which extends PDHG to a multi-GPU setting via a practical two-dimensional grid partitioning of the constraint matrix. To improve load balance and computational efficiency, we introduce a block-wise random permutation strategy combined with nonzero-aware matrix partitioning. By distributing the intensive computation required in PDHG iterations, the proposed framework harnesses multi-GPU parallelism to achieve substantial speedups with relatively low communication overhead. Extensive experiments on standard LP benchmarks (including MIPLIB and Mittelmann instances) as well as huge-scale real-world datasets show that our distributed implementation, built upon cuPDLPx, achieves strong scalability and high performance while preserving full FP64 numerical accuracy.

math.OC

OPT-Engine: Benchmarking the Limits of LLMs in Optimization Modeling via Complexity Scaling

We investigate the capabilities and scalability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in optimization modeling, a domain requiring structured reasoning and precise formulation. To this end, we introduce OPT-ENGINE, an extensible benchmark framework with quantifiable and controllable complexity. OPT-ENGINE spans ten canonical Operations Research problems, systematically scaling from Linear Programming to Mixed-Integer Programming, providing a structured environment to probe the limits of automated problem formulation and solving. Utilizing OPT-Engine, we address three pivotal research questions. First, we examine whether Pure-Text Reasoning (PTR) via classical Chain-of-Thought can efficiently tackle optimization tasks, finding that PTR suffers from a critical robustness gap as task complexity increases. Second, we examine whether integrating external computational tools can mitigate PTR's arithmetic weaknesses and improve performance. Our results indicate that while such tools help with local calculations, they still fail to adhere to global optimization constraints. Finally, we pinpoint that for the current SOTA paradigm, Solver-integrated Reasoning (SIR), the automated formulation of constraints represents the primary bottleneck. These findings clarify the limitations of current paradigms and provide a structured roadmap for developing next-generation LLMs for optimization modeling. We release our code and data to facilitate future research (https://github.com/Cardinal-Operations/OPTEngine).

cs.CL

OptPipe: Memory- and Scheduling-Optimized Pipeline Parallelism for LLM Training

Pipeline parallelism (PP) has become a standard technique for scaling large language model (LLM) training across multiple devices. However, despite recent progress in reducing memory consumption through activation offloading, existing approaches remain largely heuristic and coarse-grained, often overlooking the fine-grained trade-offs between memory, computation, and scheduling latency. In this work, we revisit the pipeline scheduling problem from a principled optimization perspective. We observe that prevailing strategies either rely on static rules or aggressively offload activations without fully leveraging the interaction between memory constraints and scheduling efficiency. To address this, we formulate scheduling as a constrained optimization problem that jointly accounts for memory capacity, activation reuse, and pipeline bubble minimization. Solving this model yields fine-grained schedules that reduce pipeline bubbles while adhering to strict memory budgets. Our approach complements existing offloading techniques: whereas prior approaches trade memory for time in a fixed pattern, we dynamically optimize the tradeoff with respect to model structure and hardware configuration. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently improves both throughput and memory utilization. In particular, we reduce idle pipeline time by up to 50% under the same per-device memory limit, and in some cases, enable the training of larger models within limited memory budgets.

cs.DC

StepORLM: A Self-Evolving Framework With Generative Process Supervision For Operations Research Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities for solving Operations Research (OR) problems. While reinforcement learning serves as a powerful paradigm for LLM training on OR problems, existing works generally face two key limitations. First, outcome reward suffers from the credit assignment problem, where correct final answers can reinforce flawed reasoning. Second, conventional discriminative process supervision is myopic, failing to evaluate the interdependent steps of OR modeling holistically. To this end, we introduce StepORLM, a novel self-evolving framework with generative process supervision. At its core, StepORLM features a co-evolutionary loop where a policy model and a generative process reward model (GenPRM) iteratively improve on each other. This loop is driven by a dual-feedback mechanism: definitive, outcome-based verification from an external solver, and nuanced, holistic process evaluation from the GenPRM. The combined signal is used to align the policy via Weighted Direct Preference Optimization (W-DPO) and simultaneously refine the GenPRM. Our resulting 8B-parameter StepORLM establishes a new state-of-the-art across six benchmarks, significantly outperforming vastly larger generalist models, agentic methods, and specialized baselines. Moreover, the co-evolved GenPRM is able to act as a powerful and universally applicable process verifier, substantially boosting the inference scaling performance of both our own model and other existing LLMs.

cs.AI

FMIP: Joint Continuous-Integer Flow For Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a foundational tool for complex decision-making problems. However, the NP-hard nature of MILP presents a significant computational challenge, motivating the development of machine learning-based heuristic solutions to accelerate downstream solvers. While recent generative models have shown promise in learning powerful heuristics, they suffer from a critical limitation. That is, they model the distribution of only the integer variables and fail to capture the intricate coupling between integer and continuous variables, creating an information bottleneck and ultimately leading to suboptimal solutions. To this end, we propose Joint Continuous-Integer Flow for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (FMIP), which is the first generative framework that models the joint distribution of both integer and continuous variables for MILP solutions. Built upon the joint modeling paradigm, a holistic guidance mechanism is designed to steer the generative trajectory, actively refining solutions toward optimality and feasibility during the inference process. Extensive experiments on eight standard MILP benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of FMIP against existing baselines, reducing the primal gap by 41.34% on average. Moreover, we show that FMIP is fully compatible with arbitrary backbone networks and various downstream solvers, making it well-suited for a broad range of real-world MILP applications.

math.OC