Manh Hung Nguyen

Manh Hung Nguyen, Lisheng Sun, Nathan Grinsztajn et al.

Meta-learning from learning curves is an important yet often neglected research area in the Machine Learning community. We introduce a series of Reinforcement Learning-based meta-learning challenges, in which an agent searches for the best suited algorithm for a given dataset, based on feedback of learning curves from the environment. The first round attracted participants both from academia and industry. This paper analyzes the results of the first round (accepted to the competition program of WCCI 2022), to draw insights into what makes a meta-learner successful at learning from learning curves. With the lessons learned from the first round and the feedback from the participants, we have designed the second round of our challenge with a new protocol and a new meta-dataset. The second round of our challenge is accepted at the AutoML-Conf 2022 and currently ongoing .

Manh Hung Nguyen, Adish Singla

Large language models (LLMs) have significant potential for generating educational questions and problems, enabling educators to create large-scale learning materials. However, LLMs are fundamentally limited by the ``Artificial Hivemind'' effect, where they generate similar responses within the same model and produce homogeneous outputs across different models. As a consequence, students may be exposed to overly similar and repetitive LLM-generated problems, which harms diversity of thought. Drawing inspiration from Wallas's theory of creativity and Guilford's framework of divergent-convergent thinking, we propose CreativeDC, a two-phase prompting method that explicitly scaffolds the LLM's reasoning into distinct phases. By decoupling creative exploration from constraint satisfaction, our method enables LLMs to explore a broader space of ideas before committing to a final problem. We evaluate CreativeDC for creative problem generation using a comprehensive set of metrics that capture diversity, novelty, and utility. The results show that CreativeDC achieves significantly higher diversity and novelty compared to baselines while maintaining high utility. Moreover, scaling analysis shows that CreativeDC generates a larger effective number of distinct problems as more are sampled, increasing at a faster rate than baseline methods.