Yuren Mao
2026
Can We Predict Before Executing Machine Learning Agents?
Jingsheng Zheng | Jintian Zhang | Yujie Luo | Yuren Mao | Yunjun Gao | Lun Du | Huajun Chen | Ningyu Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jingsheng Zheng | Jintian Zhang | Yujie Luo | Yuren Mao | Yunjun Gao | Lun Du | Huajun Chen | Ningyu Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Autonomous machine learning agents have revolutionized scientific discovery, yet they remain constrained by a Generate-Execute-Feedback paradigm. Previous approaches suffers from a severe Execution Bottleneck, as hypothesis evaluation relies strictly on expensive physical execution. To bypass these physical constraints, we internalize execution priors to substitute costly runtime checks with instantaneous predictive reasoning, drawing inspiration from World Models. In this work, we formalize the task of Data-centric Solution Preference and construct a comprehensive corpus of 18,438 pairwise comparisons. We demonstrate that LLMs exhibit significant predictive capabilities when primed with a Verified Data Analysis Report, achieving 61.5% accuracy and robust confidence calibration. Finally, we instantiate this framework in ForeAgent, an agent that employs a Predict-then-Verify loop, achieving a 6x acceleration in convergence while surpassing execution-based baselines by +6%.
2022
MetaWeighting: Learning to Weight Tasks in Multi-Task Learning
Yuren Mao | Zekai Wang | Weiwei Liu | Xuemin Lin | Pengtao Xie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
Yuren Mao | Zekai Wang | Weiwei Liu | Xuemin Lin | Pengtao Xie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
Task weighting, which assigns weights on the including tasks during training, significantly matters the performance of Multi-task Learning (MTL); thus, recently, there has been an explosive interest in it. However, existing task weighting methods assign weights only based on the training loss, while ignoring the gap between the training loss and generalization loss. It degenerates MTL’s performance. To address this issue, the present paper proposes a novel task weighting algorithm, which automatically weights the tasks via a learning-to-learn paradigm, referred to as MetaWeighting. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the superiority of our proposed method in multi-task text classification.
2021
BanditMTL: Bandit-based Multi-task Learning for Text Classification
Yuren Mao | Zekai Wang | Weiwei Liu | Xuemin Lin | Wenbin Hu
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuren Mao | Zekai Wang | Weiwei Liu | Xuemin Lin | Wenbin Hu
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Task variance regularization, which can be used to improve the generalization of Multi-task Learning (MTL) models, remains unexplored in multi-task text classification. Accordingly, to fill this gap, this paper investigates how the task might be effectively regularized, and consequently proposes a multi-task learning method based on adversarial multi-armed bandit. The proposed method, named BanditMTL, regularizes the task variance by means of a mirror gradient ascent-descent algorithm. Adopting BanditMTL in the multi-task text classification context is found to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The results of extensive experiments back up our theoretical analysis and validate the superiority of our proposals.
2020
Tchebycheff Procedure for Multi-task Text Classification
Yuren Mao | Shuang Yun | Weiwei Liu | Bo Du
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Yuren Mao | Shuang Yun | Weiwei Liu | Bo Du
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Multi-task Learning methods have achieved great progress in text classification. However, existing methods assume that multi-task text classification problems are convex multiobjective optimization problems, which is unrealistic in real-world applications. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel Tchebycheff procedure to optimize the multi-task classification problems without convex assumption. The extensive experiments back up our theoretical analysis and validate the superiority of our proposals.