Lingching Tung

Weitong Qian, Beicheng Xu, Zhongao Xie et al.

Scientific research has traditionally been human-intensive, requiring researchers to coordinate literature, ideas, experiments, manuscripts, and review responses across long project cycles. The rise of LLM-based scientific agents creates an opportunity to automate this process. Such a system must support the full research lifecycle, maintain structured persistent memory across projects, and improve its own research procedures over time. However, existing systems either partially satisfy or fail to satisfy these requirements, leaving a gap for a unified automated scientific research system. As a result, we present AutoSci, a memory-centric agentic system for the full scientific research lifecycle. AutoSci is organized around four modules. SciMem provides schema-governed research memory, separating Long-Term Knowledge Memory for reusable scientific knowledge from Active Research Memory for project-level artifacts such as ideas, experiments, manuscripts, and reviews. SciFlow executes a five-stage lifecycle from literature understanding to rebuttal through a harness that controls state, context, verification, feedback, and orchestration. SciDAG augments difficult skills with DAG-shaped multi-agent operators and reusable stage-specific templates. SciEvolve converts feedback signals from users, experiments, reviews, and external environments into versioned updates to SciMem organization, SciFlow skills, and SciDAG templates. Together, these modules make AutoSci a persistent research environment that can execute, remember, and evolve across research projects. The code repository is available at https://github.com/skyllwt/AutoSci.

Beicheng Xu, Weitong Qian, Lingching Tung et al.

To lower the expertise barrier in machine learning, the AutoML community has focused on the CASH problem, which jointly automates algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning. While traditional methods like Bayesian Optimization (BO) struggle with cold-start issues, Large Language Models (LLMs) can mitigate these through semantic priors. However, existing LLM-based optimizers generalize poorly to high-dimensional, structured CASH spaces. In this paper, we propose LB-MCTS, a trajectory-structured optimization framework that uses a Monte Carlo Tree Search tree as a shared state for algorithm selection, hyperparameter refinement, and BO-LLM proposer synergy. Within this shared state, BO provides algorithm-specific surrogate modeling for quantitative search, while the LLM exploits path-aware selective memory to generate semantic proposals and reflections. As the surrogate model improves, a reliability-aware proposer policy adaptively shifts from LLM-driven to BO-driven proposals within a unified search trajectory. Experiments on 104 AMLB datasets demonstrate that LB-MCTS consistently outperforms BO-based, LLM-based, and hybrid baselines.

Beicheng Xu, Lingching Tung, Yuchen Wang et al.

Apache Spark SQL is a cornerstone of modern big data analytics.However,optimizing Spark SQL performance is challenging due to its vast configuration space and the prohibitive cost of evaluating massive workloads. Existing tuning methods predominantly rely on full-fidelity evaluations, which are extremely time-consuming,often leading to suboptimal performance within practical budgets.While multi-fidelity optimization offers a potential solution, directly applying standard techniques-such as data volume reduction or early stopping-proves ineffective for Spark SQL as they fail to preserve performance correlations or represent true system bottlenecks. To address these challenges, we propose MFTune, an efficient multi-fidelity framework that introduces a query-based fidelity partitioning strategy, utilizing representative SQL subsets to provide accurate, low-cost proxies. To navigate the huge search space, MFTune incorporates a density-based optimization mechanism for automated knob and range compression, alongside an adapted transfer learning approach and a two-phase warm start to further accelerate the tuning process. Experimental results on TPC-H and TPC-DS benchmarks demonstrate that MFTune significantly outperforms five state-of-the-art tuning methods, identifying superior configurations within practical time constraints.