PhD CandidateThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Yuxiao Hu胡愉霄
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
Selected papers
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NeurIPS
DASS: A Solver-Adaptable Dynamic Auxiliary Search Strategy for Symbolic Regression
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.
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ICLR
GenSR: Symbolic Regression Based on Equation Generative Space
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.
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ICLR
Context-Alignment: Activating and Enhancing LLMs Capabilities in Time Series
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.
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CVPR
Focus on Hiders: Exploring Hidden Threats for Enhancing Adversarial Training
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.
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Environ. Int.
Domain knowledge-enhanced multi-spatial multi-temporal PM2.5 forecasting with integrated monitoring and reanalysis data
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.
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CVPR
Discrete Point-Wise Attack Is Not Enough: Generalized Manifold Adversarial Attack for Face Recognition
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.
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Nucl. Sci. Tech.
An online fast multi-track locating algorithm for high-resolution single-event effect test platform
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.
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arXiv
Beyond Equation Search: Conjecture-Guided Discovery with SCOPE and ClosureBench
Scientist agents pursue competing conjectures through equation modeling, questions and active experiments, evaluated on ClosureBench, 60 interactive closure-discovery tasks across five scientific domains.
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arXiv
Learning to Design SR Solvers: Harness Optimization for Symbolic Regression
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.
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