The Optimization and Machine Learning (OptiMaL) Lab

Publications:

2026
Evaluating and Mitigating the Misguidance Effect of Buggy Code in LLM-Generated Unit Tests. Zhao, J.; Zhou, S.; Cohen, E. In The 35th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2026), In press, 2026.
Do Coverage and Mutation Scores of LLM-Generated Test Suites Correlate With Their Effectiveness? (Replicability Study). Zhao, J.; Zhou, S.; Cohen, E. In The 35th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2026), In press, 2026.
Lightweight and Faithful Visual Condition Checking in Behavior Trees via Expert-Regularized Reinforcement Learning. Moon, H.; Cohen, E. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 41764-41799, 2026.
Make Use of Your Search Effort: Data Augmentation for Learning Effective Planning Heuristics from Optimal Plans. Zhong, S.; Cohen, E. In The 19th International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2026), In press, 2026.
CP-SynC: Multi-Agent Zero-Shot Constraint Modeling in MiniZinc with Synthesized Checkers. Song, Y.; Cohen, E. In Proceedings of the 20th Learning and Intelligent Optimization Conference (LION 2026), In press, 2026.
2025
Empowering Decision Trees via Shape Function Branching. Upadhya, N.; Cohen, E. In The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025), 122263-122308, 2025.
Optimal Decision Trees for Interpretable and Constrained Clustering. Shati, P.; Song, Y.; Cohen, E.; McIlraith, S. A. In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 84, 2025.
Efficient Detection of Stigmatizing Language in Electronic Health Records via In-Context Learning: A Comparative Analysis and Validation Study. Chen, H.; Alfred, M.; Cohen, E. In JMIR Medical Informatics, e68955, 2025.
ROCKET-LRP: Explainable Time Series Classification with Application to Anomaly Prediction in Manufacturing. Ling, Z.; Aoyama, T.; Yano, K.; Cohen, E. In Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE-25), 576-583, 2025.
Variational Prefix Tuning for Diverse and Accurate Code Summarization Using Pre-trained Language Models. Zhao, J.; Song, Y.; Cohen, E. In Journal of Systems and Software, 112493, 2025.
Leveraging LLM to identify missed information in patient-physician communication: improving healthcare service quality. Zhou, X.; Cohen, E.; Zhou, X.; Montague, E. In Frontiers in Medicine, 12, 1631565, 2025.
Do LLMs Understand Constraint Programming? Zero-Shot Constraint Programming Model Generation Using LLMs. Song, Y.; Cohen, E. In Proceedings of the 19th Learning and Intelligent Optimization Conference (LION-25), 16-31, 2025.
Examining the development, effectiveness, and limitations of computer-aided diagnosis systems for retained surgical items detection: a systematic review. Chen, H.; Cohen, E.; Alfred, M. In Ergonomics, 1-16, 2025.
2024
Intersection of Performance, Interpretability, and Fairness in Neural Prototype Tree for Chest X-Ray Pathology Detection: Algorithm Development and Validation Study. Chen, H.; Alfred, M.; Brown, A. D.; Atinga, A.; Cohen, E.; others, In JMIR Formative Research, 8, e59045, 2024.
NeurCAM: Interpretable Neural Clustering via Additive Models. Upadhya, N.; Cohen, E. In Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-24), 3079-3087, 2024.
Evaluating Active Learning Strategies for Automated Classification of Patient Safety Event Reports in Hospitals. Islam, S.; Alfred, M.; Wilson, D.; Cohen, E. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 465-472, 2024.
Bi-Criteria Diverse Plan Selection via Beam Search Approximation. Zhong, S.; Shati, P.; Cohen, E. In Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS-24), 188-196, 2024.
Neural Sequence Generation with Constraints via Beam Search with Cuts: A Case Study on VRP. Shati, P.; Cohen, E.; McIlraith, S. In Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS-24), 118-126, 2024.
Gaussian Process Optimization for Adaptable Multi-Objective Text Generation using Linearly-Weighted Language Models. Pour, M. M. A.; Pesaranghader, A.; Cohen, E.; Sanner, S. In Findings of the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-24), 1529-1536, 2024.
Transformer models for mining intents and predicting activities from emails in knowledge-intensive processes. Khandaker, F.; Senderovich, A.; Zhao, J.; Cohen, E.; Yu, E.; Carbajales, S.; Chan, A. In Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 128, 107450, 2024.
Automated Classification of Patient Safety Event Reports: A Machine Learning Approach with Human-AI Collaboration. Chen, H.; Cohen, E.; Wilson, D.; Alfted, M. In JMIR Human Factors, 11, e53378, 2024.
2023
Optimal Decision Trees For Interpretable Clustering with Constraints. Shati, P.; Cohen, E.; McIlraith, S. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2022-2030, 2023.
Interpretable Clustering via Soft Clustering Trees. Cohen, E. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research (CPAIOR), 281-298, 2023.
SAT-based optimal classification trees for non-binary data. Shati, P.; Cohen, E.; McIlraith, S. A. In Constraints, 28, 166-202, 2023.
Improving Patient Safety Event Report Classification with Machine Learning and Contextual Text Representation. Chen, H.; Cohen, E.; Wilson, D.; Alfted, M. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 1063-1069, 2023.
SAT-Based Learning of Compact Binary Decision Diagrams for Classification. Shati, P.; Cohen, E.; McIlraith, S. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP), 33:1-33:19, 2023.
2022
Exploiting Hardware and Software Advances for Quadratic Models of Wind Farm Layout Optimization. Senderovich, A.; Zhang, J.; Cohen, E.; Beck, J. C. In IEEE Access (Volume: 10), 78044-78055, 2022.
2021
Unified Clustering and Outlier Detection on Specialized Hardware. Cohen, E.; Ushijima-Mwesigwa, H.; Mandal, A.; Roy, A. In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 3770-3774, 2021.
Heavy-Tails and Randomized Restarting Beam Search in Goal-Oriented Neural Sequence Decoding. Cohen, E.; Beck, J. C. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research (CPAIOR), 115-132, 2021.
Type-WA*: Using Exploration in Bounded Suboptimal Planning. Cohen, E.; Valenzano, R. A.; McIlraith, S. A. In Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 4047-4053, 2021.
SAT-based Approach for Learning Optimal Decision Trees with Non-Binary Features. Shati, P.; Cohen, E.; McIlraith, S. A. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP), 50:1-50:16, 2021.
2020
Ising-Based Consensus Clustering on Specialized Hardware. Cohen, E.; Mandal, A.; Ushijima-Mwesigwa, H.; Roy, A. In Advances in Intelligent Data Analysis XVIII: Proceedings of the 18th International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (IDA), 106-118, 2020.
An Ising Framework for Constrained Clustering on Special Purpose Hardware. Cohen, E.; Senderovich, A.; Beck, J. C. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research (CPAIOR), 130-147, 2020.
2019
Empirical Analysis of Beam Search Performance Degradation in Neural Sequence Models. Cohen, E.; Beck, J. C. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 1290-1299, 2019.
2018
Fat- and Heavy-Tailed Behavior in Satisficing Planning. Cohen, E.; Beck, J. C. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 6136-6143, 2018.
Large-Scale Analysis of the Co-Commit Patterns of the Active Developers in GitHub's Top Repositories. Cohen, E.; Consens, M. P. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 426-436, 2018.
Local Minima, Heavy Tails, and Search Effort for GBFS. Cohen, E.; Beck, J. C. In Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI), 4708-4714, 2018.
2017
Problem Difficulty and the Phase Transition in Heuristic Search. Cohen, E.; Beck, J. C. In Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 780-786, 2017.
Cost-based Heuristics and Node Re-Expansions Across the Phase Transition. Cohen, E.; Beck, J. C. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), 11-19, 2017.
(I Can Get) Satisfaction: Preference-Based Scheduling for Concert-Goers at Multi-venue Music Festivals. Cohen, E.; Huang, G.; Beck, J. C. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT), 147-163, 2017.

Theses: