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Zhongxiang Dai

Zhongxiang Dai contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Computer Science and Game Theory cs.CY

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preprint2026arXiv

ALSO: Adversarial Online Strategy Optimization for Social Agents

Social simulation provides a compelling testbed for studying social intelligence, where agents interact through multi-turn dialogues under evolving contexts and strategically adapting opponents. Such environments are inherently non-stationary, requiring agents to dynamically adjust their strategies over time. However, most Large Language Model (LLM) based social agents rely on static personas, while existing approaches for enhancing social intelligence, such as offline reinforcement learning or external planners, are ill-suited to these settings, typically assuming stationarity and incurring substantial training overhead. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{ALSO} (\textbf{A}dversarial on\textbf{L}ine \textbf{S}trategy \textbf{O}ptimization), the first framework for online strategy optimization in multi-agent social simulation. ALSO advances social adaptation through two key contributions. (1) ALSO formulates multi-turn interaction as an adversarial bandit problem, where combinations of static personas and dynamic strategy instructions are treated as arms, providing a principled solution to non-stationarity without relying on environmental stability assumptions. (2) To predict rewards and generalize sparse feedback in multi-turn dialogues, ALSO introduces a lightweight neural surrogate to predict rewards from interaction histories, enabling sample-efficient exploration and continuous online adaptation. Experiments on the Sotopia benchmark demonstrate that ALSO consistently outperforms static baselines and existing optimization methods in dynamic environments, validating the effectiveness of adversarial online strategy optimization for building robust social agents.

preprint2026arXiv

Convergence Rates of Constrained Expected Improvement

Constrained Bayesian optimization (CBO) methods have seen significant success in black-box optimization with constraints. One of the most commonly used CBO methods is the constrained expected improvement (CEI) algorithm. CEI is a natural extension of expected improvement (EI) when constraints are incorporated. However, the theoretical convergence rate of CEI has not been established. In this work, we study the convergence rate of CEI by analyzing its simple regret upper bound. First, we show that when the objective function $f$ and constraint function $c$ are assumed to each lie in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), CEI achieves the convergence rates of $\mathcal{O} \left(t^{-\frac{1}{2}}\log^{\frac{d+1}{2}}(t) \right) \ \text{and }\ \mathcal{O}\left(t^{\frac{-ν}{2ν+d}} \log^{\fracν{2ν+d}}(t)\right)$ for the commonly used squared exponential and Matérn kernels ($ν>\frac{1}{2}$), respectively. Second, we show that when $f$ is assumed to be sampled from Gaussian processes (GPs), CEI achieves similar convergence rates with a high probability. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the theoretical analysis.

preprint2026arXiv

UCO: A Multi-Turn Interactive Reinforcement Learning Method for Adaptive Teaching with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are shifting from answer providers to intelligent tutors in educational settings, yet current supervised fine-tuning methods only learn surface teaching patterns without dynamic adaptation capabilities. Recent reinforcement learning approaches address this limitation but face two critical challenges. First, they evaluate teaching effectiveness solely based on whether students produce correct outputs, unable to distinguish whether students genuinely understand or echo teacher-provided answers during interaction. Second, they cannot perceive students' evolving cognitive states in real time through interactive dialogue, thus failing to adapt teaching strategies to match students' cognitive levels dynamically. We propose the Unidirectional Cognitive Optimization (UCO) method to address these challenges. UCO uses a multi-turn interactive reinforcement learning paradigm where the innovation lies in two synergistic reward functions: the Progress Reward captures students' cognitive advancement, evaluating whether students truly transition from confusion to comprehension, while the Scaffold Reward dynamically identifies each student's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), encouraging teachers to maintain productive teaching within this zone. We evaluate UCO by comparing it against 11 baseline models on BigMath and MathTutorBench benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our UCO model outperforms all models of equivalent scale and achieves performance comparable to advanced closed-source models. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Mind-Lab-ECNU/UCO.

preprint2026arXiv

Why Zeroth-Order Adaptation May Forget Less: A Randomized Shaping Theory

Continual learning requires new-task adaptation without damaging previously acquired capabilities. Recent forward-pass and zeroth-order (ZO) results show that low-query adaptation may retain better than first-order (FO) descent, but the usual view of ZO as noisy FO estimation does not explain why. We give a local randomized gradient-shaping analysis: finite differences expose a raw shape that is mean-aligned with FO, while the norm-matched comparator fixes the expected squared adaptation norm. Under this controlled comparison, forgetting depends on how the adaptation shape exposes retention curvature. For norm-matched ZO, the expected shaped retention curvature obeys an exact identity that preserves the isotropic retention floor while contracting only the anisotropic component. Projecting this identity onto the incoming gradient yields the observable FO--ZO quadratic forgetting gap: ZO improves mean forgetting precisely when the FO direction has above-average retention curvature, by a query-dependent fraction of that curvature excess. A practical finite-query accounting separates the mean mechanism from one-batch sampling and smoothing perturbations. As an algorithmic transfer, RISE applies the calibrated ZO shape to exact FO gradients inside parameter blocks. Its target is a stability--plasticity tradeoff: randomized shaping may reduce the retention exposure paid by FO, exact gradients remove finite-smoothing bias from finite-difference ZO, and blockwise sampling supplies many local shaping directions after one gradient computation. The blockwise analysis separates mean-step damage from centered random exposure, showing how block-diagonal curvature, cross-block coupling, and local shaping diagnostics specify where this exact-gradient transfer is most likely to be visible.

preprint2022arXiv

Bayesian Optimization under Stochastic Delayed Feedback

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely-used sequential method for zeroth-order optimization of complex and expensive-to-compute black-box functions. The existing BO methods assume that the function evaluation (feedback) is available to the learner immediately or after a fixed delay. Such assumptions may not be practical in many real-life problems like online recommendations, clinical trials, and hyperparameter tuning where feedback is available after a random delay. To benefit from the experimental parallelization in these problems, the learner needs to start new function evaluations without waiting for delayed feedback. In this paper, we consider the BO under stochastic delayed feedback problem. We propose algorithms with sub-linear regret guarantees that efficiently address the dilemma of selecting new function queries while waiting for randomly delayed feedback. Building on our results, we also make novel contributions to batch BO and contextual Gaussian process bandits. Experiments on synthetic and real-life datasets verify the performance of our algorithms.

preprint2022arXiv

NASI: Label- and Data-agnostic Neural Architecture Search at Initialization

Recent years have witnessed a surging interest in Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Various algorithms have been proposed to improve the search efficiency and effectiveness of NAS, i.e., to reduce the search cost and improve the generalization performance of the selected architectures, respectively. However, the search efficiency of these algorithms is severely limited by the need for model training during the search process. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel NAS algorithm called NAS at Initialization (NASI) that exploits the capability of a Neural Tangent Kernel in being able to characterize the converged performance of candidate architectures at initialization, hence allowing model training to be completely avoided to boost the search efficiency. Besides the improved search efficiency, NASI also achieves competitive search effectiveness on various datasets like CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet. Further, NASI is shown to be label- and data-agnostic under mild conditions, which guarantees the transferability of architectures selected by our NASI over different datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Neural Ensemble Search via Bayesian Sampling

Recently, neural architecture search (NAS) has been applied to automate the design of neural networks in real-world applications. A large number of algorithms have been developed to improve the search cost or the performance of the final selected architectures in NAS. Unfortunately, these NAS algorithms aim to select only one single well-performing architecture from their search spaces and thus have overlooked the capability of neural network ensemble (i.e., an ensemble of neural networks with diverse architectures) in achieving improved performance over a single final selected architecture. To this end, we introduce a novel neural ensemble search algorithm, called neural ensemble search via Bayesian sampling (NESBS), to effectively and efficiently select well-performing neural network ensembles from a NAS search space. In our extensive experiments, NESBS algorithm is shown to be able to achieve improved performance over state-of-the-art NAS algorithms while incurring a comparable search cost, thus indicating the superior performance of our NESBS algorithm over these NAS algorithms in practice.

preprint2022arXiv

On Provably Robust Meta-Bayesian Optimization

Bayesian optimization (BO) has become popular for sequential optimization of black-box functions. When BO is used to optimize a target function, we often have access to previous evaluations of potentially related functions. This begs the question as to whether we can leverage these previous experiences to accelerate the current BO task through meta-learning (meta-BO), while ensuring robustness against potentially harmful dissimilar tasks that could sabotage the convergence of BO. This paper introduces two scalable and provably robust meta-BO algorithms: robust meta-Gaussian process-upper confidence bound (RM-GP-UCB) and RM-GP-Thompson sampling (RM-GP-TS). We prove that both algorithms are asymptotically no-regret even when some or all previous tasks are dissimilar to the current task, and show that RM-GP-UCB enjoys a better theoretical robustness than RM-GP-TS. We also exploit the theoretical guarantees to optimize the weights assigned to individual previous tasks through regret minimization via online learning, which diminishes the impact of dissimilar tasks and hence further enhances the robustness. Empirical evaluations show that (a) RM-GP-UCB performs effectively and consistently across various applications, and (b) RM-GP-TS, despite being less robust than RM-GP-UCB both in theory and in practice, performs competitively in some scenarios with less dissimilar tasks and is more computationally efficient.

preprint2020arXiv

R2-B2: Recursive Reasoning-Based Bayesian Optimization for No-Regret Learning in Games

This paper presents a recursive reasoning formalism of Bayesian optimization (BO) to model the reasoning process in the interactions between boundedly rational, self-interested agents with unknown, complex, and costly-to-evaluate payoff functions in repeated games, which we call Recursive Reasoning-Based BO (R2-B2). Our R2-B2 algorithm is general in that it does not constrain the relationship among the payoff functions of different agents and can thus be applied to various types of games such as constant-sum, general-sum, and common-payoff games. We prove that by reasoning at level 2 or more and at one level higher than the other agents, our R2-B2 agent can achieve faster asymptotic convergence to no regret than that without utilizing recursive reasoning. We also propose a computationally cheaper variant of R2-B2 called R2-B2-Lite at the expense of a weaker convergence guarantee. The performance and generality of our R2-B2 algorithm are empirically demonstrated using synthetic games, adversarial machine learning, and multi-agent reinforcement learning.

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