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Aoran Wang

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11 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Deep Research Arena: The First Exam of LLMs’ Research Abilities via Seminar-Grounded Tasks

Haiyuan Wan
Chen Yang
Junchi Yu
Meiqi Tu
Jiaxuan Lu
Di Yu
Jianbao Cao
Ben Gao

Deep research agents have attracted growing attention for their potential to orchestrate multi-stage research workflows, spanning literature synthesis, methodological design, and empirical verification. Despite these strides, evaluating their research capability faithfully is rather challenging due to the difficulty of collecting frontier research questions that genuinely capture researchers’ attention and intellectual curiosity. To address this gap, we introduce DeepResearch Arena, a benchmark grounded in academic seminars that capture rich expert discourse and interaction, better reflecting real-world research environments and reducing the risk of data leakage. To automatically construct DeepResearch Arena, we propose a Multi-Agent Hierarchical Task Generation (MAHTG) system that extracts research-worthy inspirations from seminar transcripts. The MAHTG system further translates research-worthy inspirations into high-quality research tasks, ensuring the traceability of research task formulation while filtering noise. With the MAHTG system, we curate DeepResearch Arena with over 10,000 high-quality research tasks from over 200 academic seminars, spanning 12 disciplines, such as literature, history, and science. Our extensive evaluation shows that DeepResearch Arena presents substantial challenges for current state-of-the-art agents, with clear performance gaps observed across different models.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Reward Model Evaluation via Automatically-Ranked Policy Alignment

Aoran Wang
Lei Ou
Yang Yu
Zongzhang Zhang

Evaluating reward models is a fundamental challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL), particularly in settings where the reward model is learned or manually designed. The standard paradigm for Reward Model Evaluation (RME) involves training an optimal policy via RL on the given reward model and assessing model quality through the performance of the resulting policy. However, this approach conflates the quality of the reward model with the effectiveness of RL training, and is computationally expensive due to the need for policy optimization. Recent RME methods attempt to circumvent this issue by evaluating reward models directly, without RL, but often rely on impractical assumptions such as access to a ground-truth reward or fail to utilize available supervision in a fine-grained manner. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Policy Preference Alignment Coefficient (PPAC), a novel metric for RME that requires neither RL training nor ground-truth rewards. PPAC first generates a sequence of automatically ranked policy preferences that guarantee monotonic improvement in the policy value, and then quantifies the alignment between these generated preferences and those implied by the candidate reward model. Experimental results across gridworld and continuous control task demonstrate that PPAC yields preference sequences with consistently increasing policy values and outperforms existing metrics in evaluating reward model quality.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

From Sequence to Structure: Uncovering Substructure Reasoning in Transformers

Xinnan Dai
Kai Yang
Jay Revolinsky
Kai Guo
Aoran Wang
Bohang Zhang
Jiliang Tang

Recent studies suggest that large language models (LLMs) possess the capability to solve graph reasoning tasks. Notably, even when graph structures are embedded within textual descriptions, LLMs can still effectively answer related questions. This raises a fundamental question: How can a decoder-only Transformer architecture understand underlying graph structures? To address this, we start with the substructure extraction task, interpreting the inner mechanisms inside the transformers and analyzing the impact of the input queries. Specifically, through both empirical results and theoretical analysis, we present Induced Substructure Filtration (ISF), a perspective that captures the substructure identification in the multi-layer transformers. We further validate the ISF process in LLMs, revealing consistent internal dynamics across layers. Building on these insights, we explore the broader capabilities of Transformers in handling diverse graph types. Specifically, we introduce the concept of thinking in substructures to efficiently extract complex composite patterns, and demonstrate that decoder-only Transformers can successfully extract substructures from attributed graphs, such as molecular graphs. Together, our findings offer a new insight on how sequence-based Transformers perform the substructure extraction task over graph data.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Guided Structural Inference: Leveraging Priors with Soft Gating Mechanisms

Aoran Wang
Xinnan Dai
Jun Pang 0001

Existing methods for inferring latent relational structures struggle to integrate partial prior knowledge, such as known edges, node-degree constraints, and global sparsity, without destabilizing training or conflicting with probabilistic assumptions. We propose Soft-Gated Structural Inference (SGSI), a VAE framework that seamlessly incorporates domain constraints via (1) soft gating with learnable edge masks to preserve gradients, (2) cloning-clamping of deterministic edges to avoid distributional conflicts, and (3) adaptive regularization to balance data-driven learning with domain constraints. By excluding known edges from stochastic inference, SGSI reallocates capacity to uncertain interactions, optimizing the information bottleneck trade-off. Experiments on 16 datasets show SGSI improves edge recovery by up to $9$% AUROC over baselines, scales to larger graphs ($94. 2$% AUROC), and maintains stable training. SGSI bridges domain expertise with data-driven learning, enabling interpretable and robust structural discovery in dynamical systems.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Benchmarking Structural Inference Methods for Interacting Dynamical Systems with Synthetic Data

Aoran Wang
Tsz Pan Tong
Andrzej Mizera
Jun Pang

Understanding complex dynamical systems begins with identifying their topological structures, which expose the organization of the systems. This requires robust structural inference methods that can deduce structure from observed behavior. However, existing methods are often domain-specific and lack a standardized, objective comparison framework. We address this gap by benchmarking 13 structural inference methods from various disciplines on simulations representing two types of dynamics and 11 interaction graph models, supplemented by a biological experimental dataset to mirror real-world application. We evaluated the methods for accuracy, scalability, robustness, and sensitivity to graph properties. Our findings indicate that deep learning methods excel with multi-dimensional data, while classical statistics and information theory based approaches are notably accurate and robust. Additionally, performance correlates positively with the graph's average shortest path length. This benchmark should aid researchers in selecting suitable methods for their specific needs and stimulate further methodological innovation.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Structural Inference of Dynamical Systems with Conjoined State Space Models

Aoran Wang
Jun Pang

This paper introduces SICSM, a novel structural inference framework that integrates Selective State Space Models (selective SSMs) with Generative Flow Networks (GFNs) to handle the challenges posed by dynamical systems with irregularly sampled trajectories and partial observations. By utilizing the robust temporal modeling capabilities of selective SSMs, our approach learns input-dependent transition functions that adapt to non-uniform time intervals, thereby enhancing the accuracy of structural inference. By aggregating dynamics across diverse temporal dependencies and channeling them into the GFN, the SICSM adeptly approximates the posterior distribution of the system's structure. This process not only enables precise inference of complex interactions within partially observed systems but also ensures the seamless integration of prior knowledge, enhancing the model’s accuracy and robustness. Extensive evaluations on sixteen diverse datasets demonstrate that SICSM outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios characterized by irregular sampling and incomplete observations, which highlight its potential as a reliable tool for scientific discovery and system diagnostics in disciplines that demand precise modeling of complex interactions.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Structural Inference with Dynamics Encoding and Partial Correlation Coefficients

Aoran Wang
Jun Pang 0001

This paper introduces a novel approach to structural inference, combining a variational dynamics encoder with partial correlation coefficients. In contrast to prior methods, our approach leverages variational inference to encode node dynamics within latent variables, and structural reconstruction relies on the calculation of partial correlation coefficients derived from these latent variables. This unique design endows our method with scalability and extends its applicability to both one-dimensional and multi-dimensional feature spaces. Furthermore, by reorganizing latent variables according to temporal steps, our approach can effectively reconstruct directed graph structures. We validate our method through extensive experimentation on twenty datasets from a benchmark dataset and biological networks. Our results showcase the superior scalability, accuracy, and versatility of our proposed approach compared to existing methods. Moreover, experiments conducted on noisy data affirm the robustness of our method.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Active Learning based Structural Inference

Aoran Wang
Jun Pang 0001

In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Active Learning based Structural Inference (ALaSI), to infer the existence of directed connections from observed agents’ states over a time period in a dynamical system. With the help of deep active learning, ALaSI is competent in learning the representation of connections with a relatively small pool of prior knowledge. Moreover, based on information theory, the proposed inter- and out-of-scope message learning pipelines are remarkably beneficial to structural inference for large dynamical systems. We evaluate ALaSI on various large datasets including simulated systems and real-world networks, to demonstrate that ALaSI is able to outperform previous methods in precisely inferring the existence of connections in large systems under either supervised learning or unsupervised learning.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Short Paper

Anti-drifting Feature Selection via Deep Reinforcement Learning (Student Abstract)

Aoran Wang
Hongyang Yang
Feng Mao
Zongzhang Zhang
Yang Yu
Xiaoyang Liu

Feature selection (FS) is a crucial procedure in machine learning pipelines for its significant benefits in removing data redundancy and mitigating model overfitting. Since concept drift is a widespread phenomenon in streaming data and could severely affect model performance, effective FS on concept drifting data streams is imminent. However, existing state-of-the-art FS algorithms fail to adjust their selection strategy adaptively when the effective feature subset changes, making them unsuitable for drifting streams. In this paper, we propose a dynamic FS method that selects effective features on concept drifting data streams via deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, we present two novel designs: (i) a skip-mode reinforcement learning environment that shrinks action space size for high-dimensional FS tasks; (ii) a curiosity mechanism that generates intrinsic rewards to address the long-horizon exploration problem. The experiment results show that our proposed method outperforms other FS methods and can dynamically adapt to concept drifts.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Effective and Efficient Structural Inference with Reservoir Computing

Aoran Wang
Tsz Pan Tong
Jun Pang 0001

In this paper, we present an effective and efficient structural inference approach by integrating a Reservoir Computing (RC) network into a Variational Auto-encoder-based (VAE-based) structural inference framework. With the help of Bi-level Optimization, the backbone VAE-based method follows the Information Bottleneck principle and infers a general adjacency matrix in its latent space; the RC net substitutes the partial role of the decoder and encourages the whole approach to perform further steps of gradient descent based on limited available data. The experimental results on various datasets including biological networks, simulated fMRI data, and physical simulations show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method for structural inference, either with much fewer trajectories or with much shorter trajectories compared with previous works.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Iterative Structural Inference of Directed Graphs

Aoran Wang
Jun Pang

In this paper, we propose a variational model, iterative Structural Inference of Directed Graphs (iSIDG), to infer the existence of directed interactions from observational agents’ features over a time period in a dynamical system. First, the iterative process in our model feeds the learned interactions back to encourage our model to eliminate indirect interactions and to emphasize directional representation during learning. Second, we show that extra regularization terms in the objective function for smoothness, connectiveness, and sparsity prompt our model to infer a more realistic structure and to further eliminate indirect interactions. We evaluate iSIDG on various datasets including biological networks, simulated fMRI data, and physical simulations to demonstrate that our model is able to precisely infer the existence of interactions, and is significantly superior to baseline models.

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