ATLAS uses active learning with disentangled RNN ensembles to design experiments that recover RL agent models from bandit behavior 5-10x more efficiently than random or expert baselines in simulations.
Practical optimal experiment design with probabilistic programs
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abstract
Scientists often run experiments to distinguish competing theories. This requires patience, rigor, and ingenuity - there is often a large space of possible experiments one could run. But we need not comb this space by hand - if we represent our theories as formal models and explicitly declare the space of experiments, we can automate the search for good experiments, looking for those with high expected information gain. Here, we present a general and principled approach to experiment design based on probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). PPLs offer a clean separation between declaring problems and solving them, which means that the scientist can automate experiment design by simply declaring her model and experiment spaces in the PPL without having to worry about the details of calculating information gain. We demonstrate our system in two case studies drawn from cognitive psychology, where we use it to design optimal experiments in the domains of sequence prediction and categorization. We find strong empirical validation that our automatically designed experiments were indeed optimal. We conclude by discussing a number of interesting questions for future research.
fields
cs.LG 2years
2026 2verdicts
UNVERDICTED 2representative citing papers
LLM-AutoSciLab proposes an LLM-driven closed-loop system for hypothesis generation and adaptive experiment selection that reports higher accuracy and 2-5x better sample efficiency than baselines on new chemistry and gene-network discovery benchmarks.
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ATLAS: Active Theory Learning for Automated Science
ATLAS uses active learning with disentangled RNN ensembles to design experiments that recover RL agent models from bandit behavior 5-10x more efficiently than random or expert baselines in simulations.
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LLM-AutoSciLab: Closed-Loop Scientific Discovery via Active Experimentation with LLMs
LLM-AutoSciLab proposes an LLM-driven closed-loop system for hypothesis generation and adaptive experiment selection that reports higher accuracy and 2-5x better sample efficiency than baselines on new chemistry and gene-network discovery benchmarks.