Demo Data from EDBT 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Yingru Li
dblp:156/7684
· DBLP profile ↗
7ranked-venue papers
3as first author
5since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0004-2937-4687ORCID · reported
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 3 first-author · 5 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
5 papers |
Reinforcement learning · 72% Multi-agent systems · 16% Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning · 7% |
Topics — the 15 heaviest of 15, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
exploration |
2.2 | 3 | 2025 | Scalable Exploration via Ensemble++ · NeurIPS 2025 Q-Star Meets Scalable Posterior Sampling: Bridging Theory and Practice via HyperAgent · ICML 2024 HyperDQN: A Randomized Exploration Method for Deep Reinforcement Learning · ICLR 2022 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › bandit
contextual bandit |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Scalable Exploration via Ensemble++ · NeurIPS 2025 |
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Multi-agent systems › agent architecture
hierarchical multi-agent framework |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automation · NeurIPS 2025 |
Knowledge, reasoning and agents › Multi-agent systems
LLM-based multi-agent systems |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automation · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
multi-agent reinforcement learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automation · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
thompson sampling |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Scalable Exploration via Ensemble++ · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
deep reinforcement learning |
0.8 | 2 | 2024 | HyperDQN: A Randomized Exploration Method for Deep Reinforcement Learning · ICLR 2022 Q-Star Meets Scalable Posterior Sampling: Bridging Theory and Practice via HyperAgent · ICML 2024 |
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning › sampling
posterior sampling |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Q-Star Meets Scalable Posterior Sampling: Bridging Theory and Practice via HyperAgent · ICML 2024 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › exploration
randomized exploration |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | HyperDQN: A Randomized Exploration Method for Deep Reinforcement Learning · ICLR 2022 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › off-policy reinforcement learning
off-policy policy optimization |
0.4 | 1 | 2019 | Divergence-Augmented Policy Optimization · NeurIPS 2019 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
policy optimization |
0.4 | 1 | 2019 | Divergence-Augmented Policy Optimization · NeurIPS 2019 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › policy optimization
trust region methods |
0.4 | 1 | 2019 | Divergence-Augmented Policy Optimization · NeurIPS 2019 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
LLM agents |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automation · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
regret minimization |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | Scalable Exploration via Ensemble++ · NeurIPS 2025 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation › LLM agents › tool use
tool-calling agents |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task Automation · NeurIPS 2025 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
shared-factor architecture · 0.9reinforcement learning · 0.9random linear combination · 0.9neural representation · 0.9modular architecture · 0.9hierarchical planning · 0.9ensemble · 0.9thompson sampling · 0.8posterior sampling · 0.8hypermodel · 0.8
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | OWL: Optimized Workforce Learning for General Multi-Agent Assistance in Real-World Task AutomationabstractLarge Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems show promise for automating real-world tasks but struggle to transfer across domains due to their domain-specific nature.
Current approaches face two critical shortcomings: they require complete architectural redesign and full retraining of all components when applied to new domains.
We introduce **Workforce**, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decouples strategic planning from specialized execution through a modular architecture comprising:
*(i)* a *domain-agnostic* **Planner** for task decomposition,
*(ii)* a **Coordinator** for subtask management, and
*(iii)* specialized **Workers** with *domain-specific* tool-calling capabilities.
This decoupling enables cross-domain transferability during both inference and training phases:
During inference, Workforce seamlessly adapts to new domains by adding or modifying worker agents;
For training, we introduce **Optimized Workforce Learning (OWL)**, which improves generalization across domains by optimizing a domain-agnostic planner with reinforcement learning from real-world feedback.
To validate our approach, we evaluate Workforce on the GAIA benchmark, covering various realistic, multi-domain agentic tasks.
Experimental results demonstrate Workforce achieves open-source state-of-the-art performance (**69.70%**), outperforming commercial systems like OpenAI's Deep Research by **2.34%**.
More notably, our OWL-trained 32B model achieves **52.73%** accuracy (**+16.37%**) and demonstrates performance comparable to GPT-4o on challenging tasks.
To summarize, by enabling scalable generalization and modular domain transfer, our work establishes a foundation for the next generation of general-purpose AI assistants.
*Our code is available at [Anonymous URL](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/annonymous-owl/), and our data is available at [Anonymous URL](https://huggingface.co/anonymous21016).* Mengkang Hu, Wendong Fan, Yuzhou Nie, Ziyu Ye, Bowei Xia, Zhaoxuan Jin, Yingru Li, Qianshuo Ye, Bernard Ghanem, Ping Luo 0002, Guohao Li 0001 |
NeurIPS | 9 |
| 2025 | Scalable Exploration via Ensemble++abstractThompson Sampling is a principled method for balancing exploration and exploitation, but its real-world adoption faces computational challenges in large-scale or non-conjugate settings. While ensemble-based approaches offer partial remedies, they typically require prohibitively large ensemble sizes. We propose Ensemble++, a scalable exploration framework using a novel shared-factor ensemble architecture with random linear combinations. For linear bandits, we provide theoretical guarantees showing that Ensemble++ achieves regret comparable to exact Thompson Sampling with only $\Theta(d \log T)$ ensemble sizes--significantly outperforming prior methods. Crucially, this efficiency holds across both compact and finite action sets with either time-invariant or time-varying contexts without configuration changes. We extend this theoretical foundation to nonlinear rewards by replacing fixed features with learnable neural representations while preserving the same incremental update principle, effectively bridging theory and practice for real-world tasks. Comprehensive experiments across linear, quadratic, neural, and GPT-based contextual bandits validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate Ensemble++'s superior regret-computation tradeoff versus state-of-the-art methods. Yingru Li, Baoxiang Wang 0001, Zhi-Quan Luo |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2024 | Prior-dependent analysis of posterior sampling reinforcement learning with function approximationabstractThis work advances randomized exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation modeled by linear mixture MDPs. We establish the first prior-dependent Bayesian regret bound for RL with function approximation; and refine the Bayesian regret analysis for posterior sampling reinforcement learning (PSRL), presenting an upper bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d\sqrt{H^3 T \log T})$, where $d$ represents the dimensionality of the transition kernel, $H$ the planning horizon, and $T$ the total number of interactions. This signifies a methodological enhancement by optimizing the $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\log T})$ factor over the previous benchmark (Osband and Van Roy, 2014) specified to linear mixture MDPs. Our approach, leveraging a value-targeted model learning perspective, introduces a decoupling argument and a variance reduction technique, moving beyond traditional analyses reliant on confidence sets and concentration inequalities to formalize Bayesian regret bounds more effectively. Yingru Li, Zhi-Quan Luo |
AISTATS | 1 |
| 2024 | Q-Star Meets Scalable Posterior Sampling: Bridging Theory and Practice via HyperAgentabstractWe propose HyperAgent, a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm based on the hypermodel framework for exploration in RL. HyperAgent allows for the efficient incremental approximation of posteriors associated with an optimal action-value function ($Q^\star$) without the need for conjugacy and follows the greedy policies w.r.t. these approximate posterior samples. We demonstrate that HyperAgent offers robust performance in large-scale deep RL benchmarks. It can solve Deep Sea hard exploration problems with episodes that optimally scale with problem size and exhibits significant efficiency gains in the Atari suite. Implementing HyperAgent requires minimal code addition to well-established deep RL frameworks like DQN. We theoretically prove that, under tabular assumptions, HyperAgent achieves logarithmic per-step computational complexity while attaining sublinear regret, matching the best known randomized tabular RL algorithm. Yingru Li, Lei Han 0001, Zhi-Quan Luo |
ICML | 1 |
| 2022 | HyperDQN: A Randomized Exploration Method for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Ziniu Li, Yingru Li, Yushun Zhang, Tong Zhang 0001, Zhi-Quan Luo |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2019 | Divergence-Augmented Policy OptimizationabstractIn deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature convergence and instability. This paper introduces a method to stabilize policy optimization when off-policy data are reused. The idea is to include a Bregman divergence between the behavior policy that generates the data and the current policy to ensure small and safe policy updates with off-policy data. The Bregman divergence is calculated between the state distributions of two policies, instead of only on the action probabilities, leading to a divergence augmentation formulation. Empirical experiments on Atari games show that in the data-scarce scenario where the reuse of off-policy data becomes necessary, our method can achieve better performance than other state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Qing Wang 0015, Yingru Li, Jiechao Xiong, Tong Zhang 0001 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2018 | Hidden community detection in social networks
Kun He 0001, Yingru Li, Sucheta Soundarajan, John E. Hopcroft |
Inf. Sci. | 2 |