PhD CandidateThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Yuxiao Hu胡愉霄

Yuxiao Hu at his graduation defense

Teaching machines to find the laws behind data.

I am a PhD candidate at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University working on automated scientific discovery: symbolic regression, and research agents powered by large language models.

Advisors
Prof. Jinyue Yan (Academician of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts) and Associate Prof. Yuntian Chen
Master's
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, under Prof. Chengxin Zhao
T² = a³Six planets · Kepler's third law
Research

Automated scientific discovery

I study how machines can go from fitting data to stating scientific laws: searching for interpretable equations, and building LLM agents that propose, test and revise the conjectures behind them.

  1. Symbolic regression

    Finding compact, interpretable equations efficiently: generative equation spaces, auxiliary search subspaces shared across solvers, and agent harnesses whose prompts and workflows are optimized jointly.

  2. LLM research agents

    Agents that pursue scientific conjectures rather than single expressions: they model, ask questions and run experiments, then revise their conjectures with the evidence.

  3. Trustworthy evaluation

    Benchmarks that score the evidence behind a discovery, not only the recovered equation, grounded in my earlier work on adversarial robustness.

EarlierLLMs for time series (ICLR 2025), PM2.5 forecasting (Environment International 2024), and fast multi-track locating for single-event effect testing (Nuclear Science and Techniques 2023).

Publications

Selected papers

Full list on Google Scholar ↗
  1. NeurIPS2026 · Accepted

    DASS: A Solver-Adaptable Dynamic Auxiliary Search Strategy for Symbolic Regression

    Yuxiao Hu, Qian Li, Ding Wang, Yekun Zheng, Jinyue Yan, Yuntian Chen

    A shareable search strategy that plugs into different SR solvers, building and refining a subspace of high-potential basis terms; on LLM-SRBench it nearly doubles average accuracy with a 24% runtime increase.

  2. ICLR2026

    GenSR: Symbolic Regression Based on Equation Generative Space

    Qian Li, Yuxiao Hu, Juncheng Liu, Yuntian Chen

    Maps equations into a generative latent space that is symbolically continuous and numerically smooth, then searches it coarse to fine, consistently on the rank-1 Pareto front of accuracy, simplicity and runtime.

  3. ICLR2025

    Context-Alignment: Activating and Enhancing LLMs Capabilities in Time Series

    Yuxiao Hu, Qian Li, Dongxiao Zhang, Jinyue Yan, Yuntian Chen

    Aligns time series with the linguistic structure and logic LLMs already understand, rather than at the token level, and is particularly effective in few-shot and zero-shot forecasting.

  4. CVPR2024

    Focus on Hiders: Exploring Hidden Threats for Enhancing Adversarial Training

    Qian Li, Yuxiao Hu, Yinpeng Dong, Dongxiao Zhang, Yuntian Chen

    Identifies “hiders”, samples that adversarial training defends and then loses again, and trains against them alongside worst-case examples to improve accuracy and robustness together.

  5. Environ. Int.2024

    Domain knowledge-enhanced multi-spatial multi-temporal PM2.5 forecasting with integrated monitoring and reanalysis data

    Yuxiao Hu, Qian Li, Xiaodan Shi, Jinyue Yan, Yuntian Chen

    Environment International, 192, 108997CAS Q1 Top

    Links station-level and city-level graphs across several time scales, cutting 72-hour PM2.5 forecast RMSE by 6–10% relative to the strongest of nine baselines.

  6. CVPR2023

    Discrete Point-Wise Attack Is Not Enough: Generalized Manifold Adversarial Attack for Face Recognition

    Qian Li*, Yuxiao Hu*, Ye Liu, Dongxiao Zhang, Xin Jin, Yuntian Chen

    Extends face-recognition attacks from one image to many states of an identity, and from discrete points to a continuous expression manifold, for adversarial examples that generalize better with higher visual quality.

  7. Nucl. Sci. Tech.2023

    An online fast multi-track locating algorithm for high-resolution single-event effect test platform

    Yu-Xiao Hu, Hai-Bo Yang, Hong-Lin Zhang, Jian-Wei Liao, Fa-Tai Mai, Cheng-Xin Zhao

    Nuclear Science and Techniques, 34, 72CAS Q1 Top

    A slot-based encoder–decoder that locates every heavy-ion track online for the Hi'Beam-SEE platform, at 238 fps with a 1.62 μm standard error.

Preprints

Publicly available on arXiv; not yet peer-reviewed.

  1. arXiv2026 · 2610.18938

    Beyond Equation Search: Conjecture-Guided Discovery with SCOPE and ClosureBench

    Yuxiao Hu, Qian Li, Ding Wang, Siheng Chen, Linfeng Zhang, Jinyue Yan, Yuntian Chen

    Scientist agents pursue competing conjectures through equation modeling, questions and active experiments, evaluated on ClosureBench, 60 interactive closure-discovery tasks across five scientific domains.

  2. arXiv2026 · 2610.16966

    Learning to Design SR Solvers: Harness Optimization for Symbolic Regression

    Qian Li, Yuxiao Hu, Qihao Duan, Jinyue Yan, Yuntian Chen

    Treats the prompts and workflow of an SR agent as the object of optimization; on LSR-Synth it reaches 61.33% mean Acc0.01, a 45% relative gain over the next-best baseline.

Background

Education & experience

Education

2023 – present
The Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityPhD Candidate
2020 – 2023
University of Chinese Academy of SciencesMaster's in Electronic Information
2015 – 2019
Harbin Institute of TechnologyBachelor's in Information Management and Information Systems

Research experience

Mar – Jul 2026
DP TechnologyResearch InternMentors: Linfeng Zhang and Siheng Chen