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Xingyou Song

16 accepted papers

2026

Regression Language Models for Code

ICML 2026poster

We study \textbf{code-to-metric regression}: predicting numeric outcomes of code executions, a challenging task due to the open-ended nature of programming languages. While prior methods have resorted to heavy and domain-specific feature engineering, we show that a single unified Regression Language…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Towards Robust Mathematical Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Finding the right north-star metrics is highly critical for advancing mathematical reasoning capabilities of foundation models, especially given that existing evaluations are either too easy or only focusing on getting correct short answers. To address these issues, we present IMO-Bench, a suite of

2024

Position: Leverage Foundational Models for Black-Box Optimization

ICML 2024poster

Undeniably, Large Language Models (LLMs) have stirred an extraordinary wave of innovation in the machine learning research domain, resulting in substantial impact across diverse fields such as reinforcement learning, robotics, and computer vision. Their incorporation has been rapid and transformativ…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

Discovering Adaptable Symbolic Algorithms from Scratch

IROS 2023poster

Autonomous robots deployed in the real world will need control policies that rapidly adapt to environmental changes. To this end, we propose AutoRobotics-Zero (ARZ), a method based on AutoML-Zero that discovers zero-shot adaptable policies from scratch. In contrast to neural network adaption policie…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2023

Hardness of Low Rank Approximation of Entrywise Transformed Matrix Products

NeurIPS 2023poster

Inspired by fast algorithms in natural language processing, we study low rank approximation in the entrywise transformed setting where we want to find a good rank $k$ approximation to $f(U \cdot V)$, where $U, V^\top \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times r}$ are given, $r = O(\log(n))$, and $f(x)$ is a general s…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2022

Towards Learning Universal Hyperparameter Optimizers with Transformers

NeurIPS 2022accept

Meta-learning hyperparameter optimization (HPO) algorithms from prior experiments is a promising approach to improve optimization efficiency over objective functions from a similar distribution. However, existing methods are restricted to learning from experiments sharing the same set of hyperparame…

2021

Debiasing a First-order Heuristic for Approximate Bi-level Optimization

ICML 2021spotlight

Approximate bi-level optimization (ABLO) consists of (outer-level) optimization problems, involving numerical (inner-level) optimization loops. While ABLO has many applications across deep learning, it suffers from time and memory complexity proportional to the length $r$ of its inner optimization l…

2021

Rethinking Attention with Performers

ICLR 2021oral

We introduce Performers, Transformer architectures which can estimate regular (softmax) full-rank-attention Transformers with provable accuracy, but using only linear (as opposed to quadratic) space and time complexity, without relying on any priors such as sparsity or low-rankness. To approximate s…

2021

Sub-Linear Memory: How to Make Performers SLiM

NeurIPS 2021poster

Transformer architectures have become very popular yet the original implementation requires $O(L^2)$ in serial time and memory as functions of input length $L$. Recent works proposed various linear self-attention mechanisms, scaling only as $O(L)$ for serial computation. We conduct a thorough compl…

2020

ES-MAML: Simple Hessian-Free Meta Learning

ICLR 2020poster

We introduce ES-MAML, a new framework for solving the model agnostic meta learning (MAML) problem based on Evolution Strategies (ES). Existing algorithms for MAML are based on policy gradients, and incur significant difficulties when attempting to estimate second derivatives using backpropagation on…

Cited by 148SourcecodeScholar
2020

Gradientless Descent: High-Dimensional Zeroth-Order Optimization

ICLR 2020spotlight

Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do not rely on an underlying gradient estimate and are numerica…

Cited by 81SourceScholar
2020

Observational Overfitting in Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2020poster

A major component of overfitting in model-free reinforcement learning (RL) involves the case where the agent may mistakenly correlate reward with certain spurious features from the observations generated by the Markov Decision Process (MDP). We provide a general framework for analyzing this scenario…

Cited by 171SourceScholar
2020

Ode to an ODE

NeurIPS 2020poster

We present a new paradigm for Neural ODE algorithms, called ODEtoODE, where time-dependent parameters of the main flow evolve according to a matrix flow on the orthogonal group O(d). This nested system of two flows, where the parameter-flow is constrained to lie on the compact manifold, provides sta…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2020

Rapidly Adaptable Legged Robots via Evolutionary Meta-Learning

IROS 2020poster

Learning adaptable policies is crucial for robots to operate autonomously in our complex and quickly changing world. In this work, we present a new meta-learning method that allows robots to quickly adapt to changes in dynamics. In contrast to gradient-based meta-learning algorithms that rely on sec…

Cited by 96SourceScholar
2020

Robotic Table Tennis with Model-Free Reinforcement Learning

IROS 2020poster

We propose a model-free algorithm for learning efficient policies capable of returning table tennis balls by controlling robot joints at a rate of 100Hz. We demonstrate that evolutionary search (ES) methods acting on CNN-based policy architectures for non-visual inputs and convolving across time lea…

Cited by 44SourceScholar
2020

Stochastic Flows and Geometric Optimization on the Orthogonal Group

ICML 2020poster

We present a new class of stochastic, geometrically-driven optimization algorithms on the orthogonal group O(d) and naturally reductive homogeneous manifolds obtained from the action of the rotation group SO(d). We theoretically and experimentally demonstrate that our methods can be applied in vario…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar