Many real-world games do not admit a fixed, compact rule set: instead, their dynamics are defined by interactions among a large and often evolving collection of game pieces, making general-purpose policy learning impractical. Magic: the Gathering (MTG) exemplifies this setting, where the cards themselves define and alter gameplay rules, strategic constraints, and long-term outcomes, while the pool of available cards is ever-changing. We study Draft, a constrained deck-building format of MTG in which eight players make 39-45 sequential selections from semi-random packs to construct a 40-card deck under partial information. By isolating the card selection process from gameplay, Draft provides a tractable yet non-trivial setting for studying decision-making driven by combinatorial card synergies. We propose an encoder-based model that produces set-contextualized card embeddings to encode the draft decision sequence, with a consistent improvement over linear baselines on large-scale real-world data, establishing a first learned benchmark for outcome prediction in MTG Draft. Our code is available at github.com/akulen/MtGDraftEncoder.
Imitation learning (IL)---training an agent to replicate expert behavior from demonstrations---underpins applications from robotics to language model training. Standard approaches such as Behavior Cloning (BC) are known to suffer from compounding errors and performance plateaus,…
A defining problem of the Anthropocene is to model the physical Earth and human societies as one coupled system, yet no learned representation spans their observational breadth. We argue the obstacle is geometric: the physical Earth is measured as continuous fields that ignore po…
Reliable evaluation of open-ended LLM outputs requires fine-grained rubrics, yet expert curation is costly and difficult to scale. Existing automated pipelines rely on strict judge unanimity and binary variance filters, which cannot distinguish measurable rubrics from informative…
Symbolic Regression (SR) aims to discover analytical equations from observational data and plays a central role in scientific modeling. While recent Large Language Model (LLM) based approaches show promise, they face two limitations. First, they lack data analysis mechanisms for…
Reinforcement-learning-based quantum architecture search (RL-QAS) repeatedly optimizes a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) after extending a circuit, although circuit construction and action legality are deterministic and known. We introduce DreamQAS, a model-based RL framewo…
Large-scale multivariate time series from heterogeneous IoT sensors demand accurate long-term forecasting for resource scheduling and predictive maintenance. While recent time series foundation models exhibit strong generalization, they rely on static parametric knowledge and lac…