Yan Zeng (Yana)   School of Mathematics and Statistics Beijing Technology and Business University (BTBU) Beijing, China. 102488. Address: Building of Mathematics and Statistics, BTBU, Liangxiang District, Beijing Email: yanazeng013@gmail.com Mobile: +86-135-8047-9946 Google Scholar, Github

About Me

I am a lecturer at Beijing Technology and Business University (BTBU) in China. I am fortunate to work with Shohei Shimizu as a visiting scientist of RIKEN, Japan. Before joining BTBU, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Tsinghua University (2021 - 2023), supervised by Prof. Fuchun Sun, working on causal reinforcement learning. I obtained my ph.D. degree at Guangdong University of Technology (2016 - 2021), supervised by Prof. Zhifeng Hao, and Prof. Ruichu Cai, and co-supervised by Prof. Shohei Shimizu (RIKEN & Shiga University). From 2019-2020, I was a visiting Ph.D. student in the causal inference group of RIKEN.

Research Interests

• Causal discovery and causal inference, especially with latent variables.
• Causality-inspired machine learning, especially causal reinforcement learning, policy learning, etc.

Published Publications

• A survey on causal reinforcement learning
  Yan Zeng, Ruichu Cai, Fuchun Sun, Libo Huang, Zhifeng Hao.
  TNNLS, 2024.
• Local Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Latent Variables
  Feng Xie, Zheng Li, Peng Wu, Yan Zeng#, Chunchen Liu, and Zhi Geng.
  ICML, Vienna, Austria, 2024.
• Policy Learning for Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Rewards
  Peng Wu, Ziyu Shen, Feng Xie, Zhongyao Wang, Chunchen Liu, and Yan Zeng#.
  ICML, Vienna, Austria, 2024.
• ACE: Off-Policy Actor-Critic with Causality-Aware Entropy Regularization
  Tianying Ji, Yongyuan Liang, Yan Zeng, Yu Luo, Guowei Xu, Jiawei Guo, Ruijie Zheng, Furong Huang, Fuchun Sun, Huazhe Xu.
  ICML, , Vienna, Austria, 2024 (Oral).
• KFC: Knowledge Reconstruction and Feedback Consolidation Enable Efficient and Effective Continual Generative Learning
  Libo Huang, Zhulin An, Yan Zeng, Yongjun Xu.
  ICLR (Tiny paper), Vienna, Austria, 2024.
• Causal Discovery of 1-Factor Measurement Models in Linear Latent Variable Models with Arbitrary Noise Distributions
  Feng Xie, Yan Zeng, Yangbo He, Zhengming Chen, Zhi Geng.
  Neurocomputing, 2023.
• Python package for causal discovery based on LiNGAM
  Takashi Ikeuchi, Mayumi Ide, Yan Zeng, Takashi Nicholas Maeda, Shohei Shimizu.
  JMLR, 2023, 24(14): 1-8.
• e-Tag: Class-Incremental Learning with Hierarchical Embedding Distillation and Task-Oriented Generation
  Libo Huang, Yan Zeng, Chuanguang Yang, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu.
  AAAI, Washington, DC, USA, 2023.
• Automatic Spike Sorting with Low-Rank and Sparse Representation
  Libo Huang, Gan Lu, Yan Zeng, and Wing-Kuen Ling.
  IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2023.
• Causal Discovery for Linear Mixed Data
  Yan Zeng, Shohei Shimizu, Hidetoshi Matsui, Fuchun Sun.
  Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning (CleaR), 2022.
• Offline Causal Imitation Learning with Latent Confounders
  Siyang Huang*, Yan Zeng*, Ruichu Cai, Zhifeng Hao, and Fuchun Sun.
  International Conference on Cognitive Computation and Systems (CCIS), 2022.
• Causal discovery with multi-domain LiNGAM for latent factors
  Yan Zeng, Shohei Shimizu, Ruichu Cai, Feng Xie, Michio Yamamoto, Zhifeng Hao.
  IJCAI, Montreal-themed Virtual Reality, 2021.
• Nonlinear Causal Discovery with Multiple High-Dimensional Observations
  Yan Zeng, Zhifeng Hao, Ruichu Cai, Feng Xie, Libo Huang, Shohei Shimizu.
  TNNLS, 2021.
• A causal discovery algorithm based on the prior selection of leaf nodes
  Yan Zeng, Zhifeng Hao, Ruichu Cai, Feng Xie, Liang Ou, Ruihui Huang.
  Neural Networks, 2020.
• Spike Sorting Based On Low-Rank And Sparse Representation
  Libo Huang, Wing-Kuen Ling, Yan Zeng.
  ICME, 2020: 1-6.
• An Efficient Entropy-Based Causal Discovery Method for Linear Structural Equation Models with IID Noise Variables
  Feng Xie, Ruichu Cai, Yan Zeng, Jiantao Gao, Zhifeng Hao.
  TNNLS, 2019.
• Causal Discovery of Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model with Small Samples
  Feng Xie, Ruichu Cai, Yan Zeng, Zhifeng Hao.
  IScIDE. Springer, Cham, 2019: 381-393.
• WMsorting: wavelet packets’ decomposition and mutual information-based spike sorting method
  Libo Huang, Wing-Kuen Ling, Ruichu Cai, Yan Zeng.
  IEEE transactions on nanobioscience, 2019, 18(3): 283-295.

Academic Services

• PC: NeurIPS 2024, ICML 2024, AAAI 2023-2025, UAI 2022-2024, CleaR 2022-2024, KDD 2025, ICDM 2024, ACMMM 2023.
• Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on NNLS (TNNLS); Science China: Information Science; IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics; Neurocomputing; Knowledge and Information Systems.