Xinyuan Wang
Publications
Causally-Guided Diffusion for Stable Feature Selection
Feature selection is fundamental to robust data-centric AI, but most existing methods optimize predictive performance under a single data distribution. This often selects spurious features that fail under distribution shifts. Motivated by principles from causal invariance, we study feature selection from a stability perspective and introduce Causally-Guided Diffusion for Stable Feature Selection (CGDFS). In CGDFS, we formalized feature selection as approximate posterior inference over feature subsets, whose posterior mass favors low prediction error and low cross-environment variance. Our framework combines three key insights: First, we formulate feature selection as stability-aware posterior sampling. Here, causal invariance serves as a soft inductive bias rather than explicit causal discovery. Second, we train a diffusion model as a learned prior over plausible continuous selection masks, combined with a stability-aware likelihood that rewards invariance across environments. This diffusion prior captures structural dependencies among features and enables scalable exploration of the combinatorially large selection space. Third, we perform guided annealed Langevin sampling that combines the diffusion prior with the stability objective, which yields a tractable, uncertainty-aware posterior inference that avoids discrete optimization and produces robust feature selections. We evaluate CGDFS on open-source real-world datasets exhibiting distribution shifts. Across both classification and regression tasks, CGDFS consistently selects more stable and transferable feature subsets, which leads to improved out-of-distribution performance and greater selection robustness compared to sparsity-based, tree-based, and stability-selection baselines.
BandPO: Bridging Trust Regions and Ratio Clipping via Probability-Aware Bounds for LLM Reinforcement Learning
Proximal constraints are fundamental to the stability of the Large Language Model reinforcement learning. While the canonical clipping mechanism in PPO serves as an efficient surrogate for trust regions, we identify a critical bottleneck: fixed bounds strictly constrain the upward update margin of low-probability actions, disproportionately suppressing high-advantage tail strategies and inducing rapid entropy collapse. To address this, we introduce Band-constrained Policy Optimization (BandPO). BandPO replaces canonical clipping with Band, a unified theoretical operator that projects trust regions defined by f-divergences into dynamic, probability-aware clipping intervals. Theoretical analysis confirms that Band effectively resolves this exploration bottleneck. We formulate this mapping as a convex optimization problem, guaranteeing a globally optimal numerical solution while deriving closed-form solutions for specific divergences. Extensive experiments across diverse models and datasets demonstrate that BandPO consistently outperforms canonical clipping and Clip-Higher, while robustly mitigating entropy collapse.