Preprint 2026
MLToolBench: Learning Tool-Augmented Agents for Machine Learning Development
* Equal contribution
Xin Yu
Ph.D. Candidate in Statistics
The Pennsylvania State University
I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Statistics at The Pennsylvania State University and am honored to be advised by Prof. Lingzhou Xue. I earned my master's degree from Penn State in 2025 and my bachelor's degree in Statistics from Nankai University in 2023. I was also fortunate to complete my undergraduate thesis under the supervision of Prof. Changliang Zou.
My research interests include statistical machine learning, with a focus on interpretability, generalization, and robustness; and post-training of foundation models, including infrastructure efficiency, reasoning, recursive self-improvement, agentic quality, and human alignment.
News
- I completed my summer internship at Meta. I am grateful to my mentors Stephen Li and Yiyao Liu for their guidance on generative recommendation, and to Pengbo for involving me in the Model Development Agent project. ✨
- Our paper has been accepted to ICML 2026. 🧑💻
- I received a full travel award to attend MLSS NYC 2026 at Columbia University. See you in NYC this summer! 🗽
- Our paper has been accepted to ICLR 2026. 🧑💻
- I started my internship at TikTok, focusing on multimodal understanding and exploring continual learning and agent-based automated error correction. ✨
- I presented a poster at NeurIPS 2025 at the San Diego Convention Center. ☀️
- I presented a poster at ICML 2025 at the Vancouver Convention Center. ☀️
- I’m thrilled to share that I’ve completed my five-month internship at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). I’m grateful to have worked with Yan Lu and Xiaoyi Zhang and honored to have received the Stars of Tomorrow award! 🧑💻
Selected Publications
See Google Scholar for an updated list of publications.
![[Preference-Based Self-Distillation: Beyond KL Matching via Reward Regularization]](Source_files/pbsd-figure1.png)
![[Towards Better Optimization For Listwise Preference in Diffusion Models]](Source_files/diffusion-lpo-card.svg)
Industry Experience
Student Researcher · Sunnyvale, CA
- Coding Agents
- Agent Post-Training
- Recursive Self-Improvement
Meta · Feed Discovery
May 2026 – Aug. 2026Research Scientist Intern · Menlo Park, CA
- Generative Recommendation
- Tool-Augmented Agents
- Agentic RL
- GRPO
TikTok · Ads Integrity
Nov. 2025 – May 2026Research Scientist Intern · San Jose, CA
- Multimodal Understanding
- Ads Integrity
- Self-Rewarding
- On-Policy Distillation
ByteDance · Seed
May 2025 – Dec. 2025Research Scientist Intern · Seattle, WA
- Efficient RL Training
- VERL / FSDP
- GRPO
- Diffusion Preference Optimization
Microsoft Research Asia
Jan. 2023 – May 2023Intelligent Multimedia Group Intern · Beijing, China
- Efficient Vision Models
- Imbalanced Learning
- OCR
Service
Reviewer
- The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025): 5.
- 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026): 2.
- 2025 IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology: 1.
- 2026 Pattern Recognition: 1.
- 2026 IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems: 3.
- International Journal of Data Science and Analytics: 1.
- KDD 2026 AI4Sciences Track: 3.
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026): 4.
- NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Meta-Agents: 2.
- KDD 2027 AI4Sciences Track Cycle 1: 2.
- AAAI 2027: 4.
- Forty-Third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026): 6.
- ECCV 2026: 2.
Conference / Seminar Organizer
- 2025-11-01 🎤 Co-organizer of the session “Low-Rank Adaptation for Efficient Fine-Tuning in Foundation Models” at the 2025 SIAM NNP Conference at Penn State.
Teaching Assistant / Consultant
- Statistical Consultant at the Statistical Consulting Center.
- Teaching Assistant: STAT 184: Introduction to R; STAT 400: Statistical Modeling II; STAT 440: Computational Statistics.