Yitong Duan

Zhixin Han, Yanzhi Zhang, Chuyang Wei et al.

Live future prediction refers to the task of making predictions about real-world events before they unfold. This task is increasingly studied using large language model-based agent systems, and it is important for building agents that can continually learn from real-world. Just as interactive environments have often driven progress in agents, advancing live future prediction naturally motivates viewing it as a learning environment. Prior works have explored future prediction from several different parts, but have generally not framed it as a unified learning environment. This task is appealing for learning because it can provide a large number of prediction questions grounded in diverse real-world events, while preventing answer leakage. To leverage the advantages of live future prediction, we present FutureWorld, a live agentic reinforcement learning environment that closes the training loop between prediction, outcome realization, and parameters update. In our environment, we take three open-source base models and train them for consecutive days. The results show that training is effective. Furthermore, we build a daily benchmark based on the environment and evaluate several frontier agents on it to establish performance baselines for current agent systems.

Zhaoxi Zhang, Yitong Duan, Yanzhi Zhang et al. · baidu, tsinghua

Locating files and functions requiring modification in large software repositories is challenging due to their scale and structural complexity. Existing LLM-based methods typically treat this as a repository-level retrieval task and rely on multiple auxiliary tools, which often overlook code execution logic and complicate model control. We propose RepoNavigator, an LLM agent equipped with a single execution-aware tool: jumping to the definition of an invoked symbol. This unified design reflects the actual flow of code execution while simplifying tool manipulation. RepoNavigator is trained end-to-end via Reinforcement Learning (RL) directly from a base pretrained model, without relying on closed-source distillation. Experiments demonstrate that RL-trained RepoNavigator achieves state-of-the-art performance, with the 7B model outperforming 14B baselines, the 14B model surpassing 32B competitors, and the 32B model exceeding closed-source models such as GPT-5 on most metrics. These results confirm that integrating a single, structurally grounded tool with RL training provides an efficient and scalable solution for repository-level issue localization.

Chuyang Wei, Maohang Gao, Zhixin Han et al.

Many consequential decisions must be made before the relevant outcome is known. Such problems are commonly framed as future prediction, where an LLM agent must form a prediction for an unresolved question using only the public information available at the prediction time. The setting is difficult because public evidence evolves while useful supervision arrives only after the question is resolved, so most existing approaches still improve mainly from final outcomes. Yet final outcomes are too coarse to guide earlier factor tracking, evidence gathering and interpretation, or uncertainty handling. When the same unresolved question is revisited over time, temporal contrasts between earlier and later predictions can expose omissions in the earlier prediction process; we call this signal internal feedback. We introduce Milkyway, a self-evolving agent system that keeps the base model fixed and instead updates a persistent future prediction harness for factor tracking, evidence gathering and interpretation, and uncertainty handling. Across repeated predictions on the same unresolved question, Milkyway extracts internal feedback and writes reusable guidance back into the harness, so later predictions on that question can improve before the outcome is known. After the question is resolved, the final outcome provides a retrospective check before the updated harness is carried forward to subsequent questions. On FutureX and FutureWorld, Milkyway achieves the best overall score among the compared methods, improving FutureX from 44.07 to 60.90 and FutureWorld from 62.22 to 77.96.

Yanzhi Zhang, Yitong Duan, Zhaoxi Zhang et al.

Test-time scaling has emerged as a promising direction for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models in last few years. In this work, we propose Population-Evolve, a training-free method inspired by Genetic Algorithms to optimize LLM reasoning. Our approach maintains a dynamic population of candidate solutions for each problem via parallel reasoning. By incorporating an evolve prompt, the LLM self-evolves its population in all iterations. Upon convergence, the final answer is derived via majority voting. Furthermore, we establish a unification framework that interprets existing test-time scaling strategies through the lens of genetic algorithms. Empirical results demonstrate that Population-Evolve achieves superior accuracy with low performance variance and computational efficiency. Our findings highlight the potential of evolutionary strategies to unlock the reasoning power of LLMs during inference.

Yitong Duan, Weiran Wang, Jian Li

As a fundamental method in economics and finance, the factor model has been extensively utilized in quantitative investment. In recent years, there has been a paradigm shift from traditional linear models with expert-designed factors to more flexible nonlinear machine learning-based models with data-driven factors, aiming to enhance the effectiveness of these factor models. However, due to the low signal-to-noise ratio in market data, mining effective factors in data-driven models remains challenging. In this work, we propose a hypergraph-based factor model with temporal residual contrastive learning (FactorGCL) that employs a hypergraph structure to better capture high-order nonlinear relationships among stock returns and factors. To mine hidden factors that supplement human-designed prior factors for predicting stock returns, we design a cascading residual hypergraph architecture, in which the hidden factors are extracted from the residual information after removing the influence of prior factors. Additionally, we propose a temporal residual contrastive learning method to guide the extraction of effective and comprehensive hidden factors by contrasting stock-specific residual information over different time periods. Our extensive experiments on real stock market data demonstrate that FactorGCL not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods but also mines effective hidden factors for predicting stock returns.

Chuheng Zhang, Yitong Duan, Xiaoyu Chen et al.

Optimized trade execution is to sell (or buy) a given amount of assets in a given time with the lowest possible trading cost. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to optimized trade execution to learn smarter policies from market data. However, we find that many existing RL methods exhibit considerable overfitting which prevents them from real deployment. In this paper, we provide an extensive study on the overfitting problem in optimized trade execution. First, we model the optimized trade execution as offline RL with dynamic context (ORDC), where the context represents market variables that cannot be influenced by the trading policy and are collected in an offline manner. Under this framework, we derive the generalization bound and find that the overfitting issue is caused by large context space and limited context samples in the offline setting. Accordingly, we propose to learn compact representations for context to address the overfitting problem, either by leveraging prior knowledge or in an end-to-end manner. To evaluate our algorithms, we also implement a carefully designed simulator based on historical limit order book (LOB) data to provide a high-fidelity benchmark for different algorithms. Our experiments on the high-fidelity simulator demonstrate that our algorithms can effectively alleviate overfitting and achieve better performance.