Xinyue Zheng

Xinyue Zheng, Haowei Lin, Kaichen He et al. · pku

Developing AI agents capable of interacting with open-world environments to solve diverse tasks is a compelling challenge. However, evaluating such open-ended agents remains difficult, with current benchmarks facing scalability limitations. To address this, we introduce Minecraft Universe (MCU), a comprehensive evaluation framework set within the open-world video game Minecraft. MCU incorporates three key components: (1) an expanding collection of 3,452 composable atomic tasks that encompasses 11 major categories and 41 subcategories of challenges; (2) a task composition mechanism capable of generating infinite diverse tasks with varying difficulty; and (3) a general evaluation framework that achieves 91.5\% alignment with human ratings for open-ended task assessment. Empirical results reveal that even state-of-the-art foundation agents struggle with the increasing diversity and complexity of tasks. These findings highlight the necessity of MCU as a robust benchmark to drive progress in AI agent development within open-ended environments. Our evaluation code and scripts are available at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/MCU.

Shaofei Cai, Zhancun Mu, Kaichen He et al. · pku

Minecraft's complexity and diversity as an open world make it a perfect environment to test if agents can learn, adapt, and tackle a variety of unscripted tasks. However, the development and validation of novel agents in this setting continue to face significant engineering challenges. This paper presents MineStudio, an open-source software package designed to streamline the development of autonomous agents in Minecraft. MineStudio represents the first comprehensive integration of seven critical engineering components: simulator, data, model, offline pre-training, online fine-tuning, inference, and benchmark, thereby allowing users to concentrate their efforts on algorithm innovation. We provide a user-friendly API design accompanied by comprehensive documentation and tutorials. Our project is released at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/MineStudio.

Zhifeng Wang, Xinyue Zheng, Chunyan Zeng

As information technology advances, education is moving from one-size-fits-all instruction toward personalized learning. However, most methods handle modeling, item selection, and feedback in isolation rather than as a closed loop. This leads to coarse or opaque student models, assumption-bound adaptivity that ignores diagnostic posteriors, and generic, non-actionable feedback. To address these limitations, this paper presents an end-to-end personalized learning agent, EduLoop-Agent, which integrates a Neural Cognitive Diagnosis model (NCD), a Bounded-Ability Estimation Computerized Adaptive Testing strategy (BECAT), and large language models (LLMs). The NCD module provides fine-grained estimates of students' mastery at the knowledge-point level; BECAT dynamically selects subsequent items to maximize relevance and learning efficiency; and LLMs convert diagnostic signals into structured, actionable feedback. Together, these components form a closed-loop framework of ``Diagnosis--Recommendation--Feedback.'' Experiments on the ASSISTments dataset show that the NCD module achieves strong performance on response prediction while yielding interpretable mastery assessments. The adaptive recommendation strategy improves item relevance and personalization, and the LLM-based feedback offers targeted study guidance aligned with identified weaknesses. Overall, the results indicate that the proposed design is effective and practically deployable, providing a feasible pathway to generating individualized learning trajectories in intelligent education.

Xinyue Zheng, Peng Wang, Qigang Wang et al.

Neural architecture search has shown its great potential in various areas recently. However, existing methods rely heavily on a black-box controller to search architectures, which suffers from the serious problem of lacking interpretability. In this paper, we propose disentangled neural architecture search (DNAS) which disentangles the hidden representation of the controller into semantically meaningful concepts, making the neural architecture search process interpretable. Based on systematical study, we discover the correlation between network architecture and its performance, and propose a dense-sampling strategy to conduct a targeted search in promising regions that may generate well-performing architectures. We show that: 1) DNAS successfully disentangles the architecture representations, including operation selection, skip connections, and number of layers. 2) Benefiting from interpretability, DNAS can find excellent architectures under different FLOPS restrictions flexibly. 3) Dense-sampling leads to neural architecture search with higher efficiency and better performance. On the NASBench-101 dataset, DNAS achieves state-of-the-art performance of 94.21% using less than 1/13 computational cost of baseline methods. On ImageNet dataset, DNAS discovers the competitive architectures that achieves 22.7% test error. our method provides a new perspective of understanding neural architecture search.

Xinyue Zheng, Peng Wang, Qigang Wang et al.

Prior work in standardized science exams requires support from large text corpus, such as targeted science corpus fromWikipedia or SimpleWikipedia. However, retrieving knowledge from the large corpus is time-consuming and questions embedded in complex semantic representation may interfere with retrieval. Inspired by the dual process theory in cognitive science, we propose a MetaQA framework, where system 1 is an intuitive meta-classifier and system 2 is a reasoning module. Specifically, our method based on meta-learning method and large language model BERT, which can efficiently solve science problems by learning from related example questions without relying on external knowledge bases. We evaluate our method on AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC), and the experimental results show that meta-classifier yields considerable classification performance on emerging question types. The information provided by meta-classifier significantly improves the accuracy of reasoning module from 46.6% to 64.2%, which has a competitive advantage over retrieval-based QA methods.

Xinyue Zheng, Peng Wang, Qigang Wang et al.

Previous works on meta-learning either relied on elaborately hand-designed network structures or adopted specialized learning rules to a particular domain. We propose a universal framework to optimize the meta-learning process automatically by adopting neural architecture search technique (NAS). NAS automatically generates and evaluates meta-learner's architecture for few-shot learning problems, while the meta-learner uses meta-learning algorithm to optimize its parameters based on the distribution of learning tasks. Parameter sharing and experience replay are adopted to accelerate the architectures searching process, so it takes only 1-2 GPU days to find good architectures. Extensive experiments on Mini-ImageNet and Omniglot show that our algorithm excels in few-shot learning tasks. The best architecture found on Mini-ImageNet achieves competitive results when transferred to Omniglot, which shows the high transferability of architectures among different computer vision problems.