DAGLoop: Aligning Method Design with Experimental Feedback in Automated AI Research

Dengyuxing Wang, Yonggang Zhang, Qianshu Cai, Huajiang Zheng, Jun Song +2

Automated AI research agents aim to improve machine learning methods by iteratively proposing, implementing, and evaluating candidate methods. Existing work uses the outcome of each evaluation to determine how the next candidate should be revised for performance improvement. However, a candidate often combines multiple design decisions, and its overall outcome alone does not reveal which decisions produced their expected effects, whether their required conditions were satisfied, or which decisions should be retained or revised. Inspired by ablation studies in the machine learning community, we propose DAGLoop to test the expected effect of a design decision by comparing implementations with and without that decision while preserving the other decisions it requires. Specifically, DAGLoop translates each design decision's rationale into a testable expectation and pairs it with a targeted experiment, forming an experimental specification for assessing the expected effect under its required conditions. Using these specifications, we formulate ablation planning as the construction of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from the candidate method's design: nodes associate decisions with…