Practical Massively Parallel Monte-Carlo Tree Search Applied to Molecular Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is common practice to use large computational resources to train neural networks, as is known from many examples, such as reinforcement learning applications. However, while massively parallel computing is often used for training models, it is rarely used for searching solutions for combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a novel massively parallel Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MP-MCTS) algorithm that works efficiently for 1,000 worker scale, and apply it to molecular design. This is the first work that applies distributed MCTS to a real-world and non-game problem. Existing work on large-scale parallel MCTS show efficient scalability in terms of the number of rollouts up to 100 workers, but suffer from the degradation in the quality of the solutions. MP-MCTS maintains the search quality at larger scale, and by running MP-MCTS on 256 CPU cores for only 10 minutes, we obtained candidate molecules having similar score to non-parallel MCTS running for 42 hours. Moreover, our results based on parallel MCTS (combined with a simple RNN model) significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art work. Our method is generic and is expected to speed up other applications of MCTS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".