Mouxiang Chen

dblp:297/0365 · DBLP profile ↗
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13ranked-venue papers
10as first author
13since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-8341-1467ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 9 · 7 first-author · 9 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 5 · 4 first-author · 5 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 ReCode: Reinforcing Code Generation with Reasoning-Process Rewards
abstract
In practice, rigorous reasoning is often a key driver of correct code, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) for code generation often neglects optimizing reasoning quality.Bringing process-level supervision into RL is appealing, but it faces two challenges.First, training reliable reward models to assess reasoning quality is bottlenecked by the scarcity of fine-grained preference data.Second, naively incorporating such neural rewards may suffer from reward hacking.This work proposes ReCode (Reasoning-Reinforced Code Generation), a novel RL training framework comprising: (1) Contrastive Reasoning-Process Reward Learning (CRPL), which trains a reward model with synthesized optimized and degraded reasoning variants to assess the quality of reasoning process; and (2) Consistency-Gated GRPO (CG-GRPO), which integrates the reasoningprocess reward model into RL by gating neural reasoning-process rewards with strict execution outcomes, using execution correctness as a hard gate to mitigate reward hacking.Additionally, to assess the reward model's discriminative capability in assessing reasoningprocess quality, we introduce LiveCodeBench-RewardBench (LCB-RB), a new benchmark comprising preference pairs of superior and inferior reasoning processes tailored for code generation.Experimental results across Hu-manEval(+), MBPP(+), LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench show that a 7B model trained with ReCode outperforms the base version by 16.1% and reaches performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo.We further demonstrate the generalizability of ReCode by extending it to the math domain.
Lishui Fan, Mouxiang Chen, Zhongxin Liu 0002
ACL (1)3
2026 AmanNet: Adaptive multi-window and adversarial noise network for volatile time series prediction
Lefei Shen, Mouxiang Chen, Zhuo Li 0014
Inf. Process. Manag.2
2025 Synthesizing Software Engineering Data in a Test-Driven Manner
abstract
We introduce **SWE-Flow**, a novel data synthesis framework grounded in Test-Driven Development (TDD). Unlike existing software engineering data that rely on human-submitted issues, **SWE-Flow** automatically infers incremental development steps directly from unit tests, which inherently encapsulate high-level requirements. The core of **SWE-Flow** is the construction of a Runtime Dependency Graph (RDG), which precisely captures function interactions, enabling the generation of a structured, step-by-step *development schedule*. At each step, **SWE-Flow** produces a partial codebase, the corresponding unit tests, and the necessary code modifications, resulting in fully verifiable TDD tasks. With this approach, we generated 16,061 training instances and 2,020 test instances from real-world GitHub projects, creating the **SWE-Flow-Eval** benchmark. Our experiments show that fine-tuning open model on this dataset significantly improves performance in TDD-based coding. To facilitate further research, we release all code, datasets, models, and Docker images at [Github](https://github.com/Hambaobao/SWE-Flow).
Lei Zhang 0201, Jiaxi Yang 0004, Min Yang 0007, Jian Yang 0003, Mouxiang Chen, Jiajun Zhang 0012, Zeyu Cui, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
ICML5
2025 VisionTS: Visual Masked Autoencoders Are Free-Lunch Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters
abstract
Foundation models have emerged as a promising approach in time series forecasting (TSF). Existing approaches either repurpose large language models (LLMs) or build large-scale time series datasets to develop TSF foundation models for universal forecasting. However, these methods face challenges due to the severe cross-domain gap or in-domain heterogeneity. This paper explores a new road to building a TSF foundation model from rich, high-quality natural images. Our key insight is that a visual masked autoencoder, pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset, can naturally be a numeric series forecaster. By reformulating TSF as an image reconstruction task, we bridge the gap between image pre-training and TSF downstream tasks. Surprisingly, without further adaptation in the time series domain, the proposed VisionTS could achieve better zero-shot forecast performance than existing TSF foundation models. With fine-tuning for one epoch, VisionTS could further improve the forecasting and achieve state-of-the-art performance in most cases. Extensive experiments reveal intrinsic similarities between images and real-world time series, suggesting that visual models may offer a "free lunch" for TSF and highlight the potential for future cross-modality research. Our code is available in the https://github.com/Keytoyze/VisionTS.
Mouxiang Chen, Lefei Shen, Zhuo Li 0014, Xiaoyun Joy Wang, Jianling Sun
ICML1
2025 Parallel Scaling Law for Language Models
abstract
It is commonly believed that scaling language models should commit a significant space or time cost, by increasing the parameters (parameter scaling) or output tokens (inference-time scaling). We introduce another and more inference-efficient scaling paradigm: increasing the model's parallel computation during both training and inference time. We apply $P$ diverse and learnable transformations to the input, execute forward passes of the model in parallel, and dynamically aggregate the $P$ outputs. This method, namely parallel scaling (ParScale), scales parallel computation by reusing existing parameters and can be applied to any model structure, optimization procedure, data, or task. We theoretically propose a new scaling law and validate it through large-scale pre-training, which shows that a model with $P$ parallel streams is similar to scaling the parameters by $\mathcal O(\log P)$ while showing superior inference efficiency. For example, ParScale can use up to 22$\times$ less memory increase and 6$\times$ less latency increase compared to parameter scaling that achieves the same performance improvement. It can also recycle an off-the-shelf pre-trained model into a parallelly scaled one by post-training on a small amount of tokens, further reducing the training budget. The new scaling law we discovered potentially facilitates the deployment of more powerful models in low-resource scenarios, and provides an alternative perspective for the role of computation in machine learning. Our code and 67 trained model checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/QwenLM/ParScale and https://huggingface.co/ParScale.
Mouxiang Chen, Binyuan Hui, Zeyu Cui, Jiaxi Yang 0004, Dayiheng Liu, Jianling Sun, Junyang Lin, Zhongxin Liu 0002
NeurIPS1
2025 Build a Good Human-Free Prompt Tuning: Jointly Pre-Trained Template and Verbalizer for Few-Shot Classification
abstract
Prompt tuning for pre-trained language models (PLMs) has been an effective approach for few-shot text classification. To make a prediction, a typical prompt tuning method employs a template wrapping the input text into a cloze question, and a verbalizer mapping the output embedding to labels. However, current methods typically depend on handcrafted templates and verbalizers, which require much domain-specific prior knowledge by human efforts. In this work, we investigate how to build a good human-free prompt tuning using soft prompt templates and soft verbalizers, which can be learned directly from data. To address the challenge of data scarcity, we integrate a set of trainable bases for sentence representation to transfer the contextual information into a low-dimensional space. By jointly pre-training the soft prompts and the bases using contrastive learning, the projection space can catch critical semantics at the sentence level, which could be transferred to various downstream tasks. To better bridge the gap between downstream tasks and the pre-training procedure, we formulate the few-shot classification tasks as another contrastive learning problem. We name this Jointly Pretrained Template and Verbalizer (JPTV). Extensive experiments show that this human-free prompt tuning can achieve comparable or even better performance than manual prompt tuning.
Mouxiang Chen, Xiaoyun Joy Wang, Zhuo Li 0014, Jianling Sun
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2024 JumpCoder: Go Beyond Autoregressive Coder via Online Modification
abstract
While existing code large language models (code LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in code generation, their autoregressive sequential generation inherently lacks reversibility.This limitation hinders them from timely correcting previous missing statements during coding as humans do, often leading to error propagation and suboptimal performance.We introduce JUMPCODER, a novel model-agnostic framework that enables human-like online modification and non-sequential generation to augment code LLMs.The key idea behind JUMP-CODER is to insert new code into the currently generated code when necessary during generation, which is achieved through an auxiliary infilling model that works in tandem with the code LLM.Since identifying the best infill position beforehand is intractable, we adopt an infill-first, judge-later strategy, which experiments with filling at the k most critical positions following the generation of each line, and uses an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) parser alongside the Generation Model Scoring to effectively judge the validity of each potential infill.Extensive experiments using six state-ofthe-art code LLMs across multiple and multilingual benchmarks consistently indicate significant improvements over all baselines.Our code is public at https://github.com/ Keytoyze/JumpCoder.
Mouxiang Chen, Zhongxin Liu 0002, Xiaoxue Ren, Jianling Sun
ACL (1)1
2024 Identifiability Matters: Revealing the Hidden Recoverable Condition in Unbiased Learning to Rank
abstract
Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) aims to train unbiased ranking models from biased click logs, by explicitly modeling a generation process for user behavior and fitting click data based on examination hypothesis. Previous research found empirically that the true latent relevance is mostly recoverable through click fitting. However, we demonstrate that this is not always achievable, resulting in a significant reduction in ranking performance. This research investigates the conditions under which relevance can be recovered from click data in the first principle. We initially characterize a ranking model as identifiable if it can recover the true relevance up to a scaling transformation, a criterion sufficient for the pairwise ranking objective. Subsequently, we investigate an equivalent condition for identifiability, articulated as a graph connectivity test problem: the recovery of relevance is feasible if and only if the identifiability graph (IG), derived from the underlying structure of the dataset, is connected. The presence of a disconnected IG may lead to degenerate cases and suboptimal ranking performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce two methods, namely node intervention and node merging, designed to modify the dataset and restore the connectivity of the IG. Empirical results derived from a simulated dataset and two real-world LTR benchmark datasets not only validate our proposed theory, but also demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in alleviating data bias when the relevance model is unidentifiable.
Mouxiang Chen, Zhuo Li 0014, Jianling Sun
ICML1
2024 B4: Towards Optimal Assessment of Plausible Code Solutions with Plausible Tests
abstract
Selecting the best code solution from multiple generated ones is an essential task in code generation, which can be achieved by using some reliable validators (e.g., developer-written test cases) for assistance. Since reliable test cases are not always available and can be expensive to build in practice, researchers propose to automatically generate test cases to assess code solutions. However, when both code solutions and test cases are plausible and not reliable, selecting the best solution becomes challenging. Although some heuristic strategies have been proposed to tackle this problem, they lack a strong theoretical guarantee and it is still an open question whether an optimal selection strategy exists. Our work contributes in two ways. First, we show that within a Bayesian framework, the optimal selection strategy can be defined based on the posterior probability of the observed passing states between solutions and tests. The problem of identifying the best solution is then framed as an integer programming problem. Second, we propose an efficient approach for approximating this optimal (yet uncomputable) strategy, where the approximation error is bounded by the correctness of prior knowledge. We then incorporate effective prior knowledge to tailor code generation tasks. Both theoretical and empirical studies confirm that existing heuristics are limited in selecting the best solutions with plausible test cases. Our proposed approximated optimal strategy ℬ4 significantly surpasses existing heuristics in selecting code solutions generated by large language models (LLMs) with LLM-generated tests, achieving a relative performance improvement by up to 50% over the strongest heuristic and 246% over the random selection in the most challenging scenarios. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZJU-CTAG/B4.
Mouxiang Chen, Zhongxin Liu 0002, He Tao, Yusu Hong, David Lo 0001, Xin Xia 0001, Jianling Sun
ASE1
2024 Calibration of Time-Series Forecasting: Detecting and Adapting Context-Driven Distribution Shift
abstract
Recent years have witnessed the success of introducing deep learning models to time series forecasting. From a data generation perspective, we illustrate that existing models are susceptible to distribution shifts driven by temporal contexts, whether observed or unobserved. Such context-driven distribution shift (CDS) introduces biases in predictions within specific contexts and poses challenges for conventional training paradigms. In this paper, we introduce a universal calibration methodology for the detection and adaptation of CDS with a trained model. To this end, we propose a novel CDS detector, termed the "residual-based CDS detector" or "Reconditionor", which quantifies the model's vulnerability to CDS by evaluating the mutual information between prediction residuals and their corresponding contexts. A high Reconditionor score indicates a severe susceptibility, thereby necessitating model adaptation. In this circumstance, we put forth a straightforward yet potent adapter framework for model calibration, termed the "sample-level contextualized adapter" or "SOLID". This framework involves the curation of a contextually similar dataset to the provided test sample and the subsequent fine-tuning of the model's prediction layer with a limited number of steps. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that this adaptation strategy can achieve an optimal bias-variance trade-off. Notably, our proposed Reconditionor and SOLID are model-agnostic and readily adaptable to a wide range of models. Extensive experiments show that SOLID consistently enhances the performance of current forecasting models on real-world datasets, especially on cases with substantial CDS detected by the proposed Reconditionor, thus validating the effectiveness of the calibration approach.
Mouxiang Chen, Lefei Shen, Zhuo Li 0014, Jianling Sun
KDD1
2022 Scalar is Not Enough: Vectorization-based Unbiased Learning to Rank
abstract
Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) aims to train an unbiased ranking model from biased user click logs. Most of the current ULTR methods are based on the examination hypothesis (EH), which assumes that the click probability can be factorized into two scalar functions, one related to ranking features and the other related to bias factors. Unfortunately, the interactions among features, bias factors and clicks are complicated in practice, and usually cannot be factorized in this independent way. Fitting click data with EH could lead to model misspecification and bring the approximation error.
Mouxiang Chen, Jianling Sun
KDD1
2022 LBD: Decouple Relevance and Observation for Individual-Level Unbiased Learning to Rank
abstract
Using Unbiased Learning to Rank (ULTR) to train the ranking model with biased click logs has attracted increased research interest. The key idea is to explicitly model the user's observation behavior when building the ranker with a large number of click logs. Considering the simplicity, recent efforts are mainly based on the position bias hypothesis, in which the observation only depends on the position. However, this hypothesis does not hold in many scenarios due to the neglect of the distinct characteristics of individuals in the same position. On the other hand, directly modeling observation bias for each individual is quite challenging, since the effects of each individual's features on relevance and observation are entangled. It is difficult to ravel out this coupled effect and thus obtain a correct relevance model from click data. To address this issue, we first present the concept of coupling effect for individual-level ULTR. Then, we develop the novel Lipschitz and Bernoulli Decoupling (LBD) model to decouple the effects on relevance and observation at the individual level. We prove theoretically that our proposed method could recover the correct relevance order for the ranking objective. Empirical results on two LTR benchmark datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines and verify its effectiveness in debiasing data.
Mouxiang Chen, Jianling Sun
NeurIPS1
2021 Adapting Interactional Observation Embedding for Counterfactual Learning to Rank
abstract
Counterfactual Learning to Rank (CLTR) becomes an attractive research topic due to its capability of training ranker with click logs. However, CLTR inherently suffers from a large amount of bias caused by confounders, variables that affect both the observation (examination) behavior and click behavior. Recent efforts to correct bias mostly focus on position bias, which assumes that each observation in a ranking list is isolated and only depends on the position. Though effective, users often engage with documents in an interactive manner. Ignoring the interactions between observations/clicks would incur a large interactional observation bias no matter how much data is collected. In this work, we leverage the embedding method to develop an Interactional Observation-Based Model (IOBM) to estimate the observation probability. We argue that while there exist complex observed and unobserved confounders for observation/click interactions, it is sufficient to use the embedding as a proxy confounder to uncover the relevant information for the prediction of the observation propensity. Moreover, the embedding could offer an alternative to the fully specified generative model for observation and decouples the complex interaction structure of observations/clicks. In our IOBM, we first learn the individual observation embedding to capture position and click information. Then, we learn the interactional observation embedding to uncover their local interaction structure. To filter out irrelevant information and reduce contextual bias, we utilize query context information and propose the intra-observation attention and the inter-observation attention, respectively. We conduct extensive experiments on two LTR benchmark datasets, demonstrating that the proposed IOBM consistently achieves better performance over the baseline models in various click situations and verifying its effectiveness of eliminating interactional observation bias.
Mouxiang Chen, Jianling Sun, Steven C. H. Hoi
SIGIR1