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Mle-star: Machine learning engineering agent via search and targeted refinement

15 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

15 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Agents based on large language models (LLMs) for machine learning engineering (MLE) can automatically implement ML models via code generation. However, existing approaches to build such agents often rely heavily on inherent LLM knowledge and employ coarse exploration strategies that modify the entire code structure at once. This limits their ability to select effective task-specific models and perform deep exploration within specific components, such as experimenting extensively with feature engineering options. To overcome these, we propose MLE-STAR, a novel approach to build MLE agents. MLE-STAR first leverages external knowledge by using a search engine to retrieve effective models from the web, forming an initial solution, then iteratively refines it by exploring various strategies targeting specific ML components. This exploration is guided by ablation studies analyzing the impact of individual code blocks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel ensembling method using an effective strategy suggested by MLE-STAR. Our experimental results show that MLE-STAR achieves medals in 64% of the Kaggle competitions on the MLE-bench Lite, significantly outperforming the best alternative.

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years

2026 13 2025 2

representative citing papers

LongDS-Bench: On the Failure of Long-Horizon Agentic Data Analysis

cs.LG · 2026-05-28 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

LongDS benchmark shows state-of-the-art agents achieve only 48.45% accuracy on long-horizon data analysis tasks, with performance dropping 47 points from early to late turns and state-maintenance errors causing most failures.

Synthetic Sandbox for Training Machine Learning Engineering Agents

cs.CL · 2026-04-06 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

SandMLE generates micro-scale synthetic MLE environments from seed tasks to enable 13x faster on-policy RL training, delivering 20-67% gains over SFT on MLE-bench-lite and better generalization to new scaffolds.

DataMaster: Data-Centric Autonomous AI Research

cs.LG · 2026-05-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0 · 2 refs

DataMaster deploys an AI agent to autonomously engineer data via tree search over external sources, shared candidate pools, and memory of past outcomes, yielding 32% higher medal rates on MLE-Bench Lite and a small GPQA gain over the base instruct model.

Pioneer Agent: Continual Improvement of Small Language Models in Production

cs.AI · 2026-04-10 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Pioneer Agent automates the full lifecycle of adapting and continually improving small language models via diagnosis-driven data synthesis and regression-constrained retraining, delivering gains of 1.6-83.8 points on benchmarks and large lifts in production-style tasks.

Can We Predict Before Executing Machine Learning Agents?

cs.CL · 2026-01-09 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

LLMs primed with verified data reports predict agent solution quality at 61.5% accuracy, powering a Predict-then-Verify agent that converges 6x faster than execution-only baselines.

GEAR: Genetic AutoResearch for Agentic Code Evolution

cs.NE · 2026-05-08 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

GEAR applies genetic algorithms to maintain and evolve multiple research states in autonomous code agents, outperforming single-path baselines by continuing to discover improvements over extended runs.

TusoAI: Agentic Optimization for Scientific Methods

cs.AI · 2025-09-28 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

TusoAI is an LLM-based agent that builds and iteratively optimizes domain-specific computational methods for scientific data analysis, outperforming expert baselines on RNA-seq denoising and earth monitoring while reporting new genetic associations.

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