Jiacheng Chen
Welcome!
I am currently a senior undergrad student in the School of Computer Science and Technology, South China University of Technology. I am honored to be advised by Prof. Yue-Jiao Gong, and fortunate to work closely with Zeyuan Ma and Hongshu Guo. We co-founded GMC-DRL research team aiming to make further exploration in Meta-Black-Box optimization.
I was an SURF fellow in Computing + Mathematical Sciences (CMS) Department at Caltech, where I am honored to be advised by Prof. Yisong Yue and Dr. Kaiyu Yang and work on AI4Math research project.
My research interests includeοΌ
- AI for Math (Formal Theorem Proving; Reasoning; β¦)
- Neuro-Symbolic AI
- Learning to Optimize
I am actively applying for PhD programs starting 2025 Fall!
π₯ News
- 2024.05: Β ππ SYMBOL will be presented in ICLR 2024 as a poster!
- 2023.12: Β ππ MetaBox will be presented in Neurips 2023 as the oral presentation!
π Publications

Reasoning in Reasoning: A Hierarchical Framework for Neural Theorem Proving (NeurIPS 2024 Workshop MATH-AI)
Ziyu Ye, Jiacheng Chen, Jonathan Light, Yifei Wang, Jiankai Sun, Mac Schwager, Philip Torr, Guohao Li, Yuxin Chen, Kaiyu Yang, Yisong Yue, Ziniu Hu.

SYMBOL: Generating Flexible Black-Box Optimizers through Symbolic Equation Learning (ICLR 2024)
Jiacheng Chen*, Zeyuan Ma*, Hongshu Guo, Yining Ma, Jie Zhang, Yue-Jiao Gong.
- Unlike previous methods incrementally auto-configuring some existing black-box algortithms, SYMBOL directly generate stepwise update rule in the form of symbolic eqution to achieve more flexible and interpretable optimization behaviour.

LLaMoCo: Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models for Optimization Code Generation
Zeyuan Ma, Hongshu Guo, Jiacheng Chen, Guojun Peng, Zhiguang Cao, Yining Ma, Yue-Jiao Gong.
- We propose to fine-tune language model to generate executable code that can be used for optimization tasks. We proposed a dataset that containing diversed optimization problems and corresponding algorithm in this paper, also leverage some tricks during training process and finally provided a fine-tuned LM for optimization tasks.

MetaBox: A Benchmark Platform for Meta-Black-Box Optimization with Reinforcement Learning (Neurips 2023 Oral)
Zeyuan Ma, Hongshu Guo, Jiacheng Chen, Zhenrui Li, Guojun Peng, Yue-Jiao Gong, Yining Ma, Zhiguang Cao.
- We released a benchmark platform for Meta-Black-Box Optimization named MetaBox. We integrate three different testsuits, about 20 baselines including traditional black-box methods and Meta-Black-Box methods, and new evaluation metrics tailored for Meta-Black-Box optimization. The codebase can be found here.

Neural Exploratory Landscape Analysis
Zeyuan Ma, Jiacheng Chen, Hongshu Guo, Yue-Jiao Gong.
- We developed an Neural-Network based lanscape analyser to replace the feature-extracting parts in Meta-Black-Box works which is usually manually designed. To ensure the generalization ability of the NeurELA, we let it operate in Multi-task setting and use neuroevolution to train it.

Auto-configuring Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff in Evolutionary Computation via Deep Reinforcement Learning (GECCO 2024)
Zeyuan Ma*, Jiacheng Chen*, Hongshu Guo, Yining Ma, Yue-Jiao Gong.
- We explore about how to make a trade-off between exploration and exploitation in Black-Box optimization through learn-based method. In this work, we carefully designed a framework which is based on transfromer-based model and leverage exploration-exploitation related feature tailored for black-box optimization scenario to resolve this problem.
- ConfigX: Modular Configuration for Evolutionary Algorithms via Multitask Reinforcement Learning, Hongshu Guo*, Zeyuan Ma*, Jiacheng Chen, Yining Ma,Zhiguang Cao, Xinglin Zhang, Yue-Jiao Gong, AAAI 2025
- Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Algorithm Selection: A Proof-of-Principle Study on Differential Evolution, Hongshu Guo, Yining Ma, Zeyuan Ma, Jiacheng Chen, Xinglin Zhang, Zhiguang Cao, Jun Zhang, Yue-Jiao Gong, GECCO 2024
π Honors and Awards
- 2024, Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF).
- 2023 - 2024, China National Scholarship.
- 2021 - 2022, China National Scholarship.
π Educations
- 2021.09 - present, School of Computer Science and Technology, South China University of Technology.

π» Research Experience
- 2024.06 - 2024.08, SURF, Caltech.
- Thesis: AI for Math.
- Advisor: Prof. Yisong Yue and Dr. Kaiyu Yang.

- 2022-03 - 2023.03, SRP, SCUT.
- Thesis: Meta Black Box Optimization.
- Advisor: Prof. Yue-Jiao Gong
