Can We Predict Before Executing Machine Learning Agents?
Jingsheng Zheng, Jintian Zhang, Yujie Luo, Yuren Mao, Yunjun Gao Zhejiang University, Lun Du Ant Group, Huajun Chen Zhejiang University and ZJU-Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Center, Ningyu Zhang Zhejiang University
原文摘要
Autonomous machine learning agents have revolutionized scientific discovery, yet they remain constrained by a Generate-Execute-Feedback paradigm. Previous approaches suffers from a severe Execution Bottleneck, as hypothesis evaluation relies strictly on expensive physical execution. To bypass these physical constraints, we internalize execution priors to substitute costly runtime checks with instantaneous predictive reasoning, drawing inspiration from World Models. In this work, we formalize the task of Data-centric Solution Preference and construct a comprehensive corpus of 18,438 pairwise comparisons. We demonstrate that LLMs exhibit significant predictive capabilities when primed with a Verified Data Analysis Report, achieving 61.5% accuracy and robust confidence calibration. Finally, we instantiate this framework in ForeAgent, an agent that employs a Predict-then-Verify loop, achieving a 6x acceleration in convergence while surpassing execution-based baselines by +6%.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表