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Bolin Ding

Publications and source records attributed to Bolin Ding.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Rethinking Verification in Agent Harnesses

Agent harnesses enable large language models to act through tools, observe the results, and iteratively work toward a task goal. Verification checks and revises agents' work to improve output quality. Yet there is limited guidance on how harnesses should organize this effort. We study verification as an axis of test-time scaling by examining when to intervene, who checks the work, and how checking leads to revision. Our framework spans four layers of the agent lifecycle: initial instructions, mid-turn reminders, completion gates, and independent review. We compare 17 designs across seven frontier coding models on Terminal-Bench (TB) and SWE-bench Verified (SWE), and introduce VisualBench for expert evaluation of visual and interactive artifacts. Initial instructions and execution-time reminders yield modest, model-dependent average gains on the coding benchmarks, without substantially increasing average output token use. Completion gates can yield larger gains but may substantially increase cost. Independent review by a critic offers a more favorable accuracy-cost tradeoff, improving average accuracy by 5.9-9.5 percentage points on TB and 3.9-6.6 on SWE at 1.13-1.25 and 1.00-1.04 times baseline cost, respectively. On VisualBench, independent review achieves net preferences of 13.2-23.8 points over the baseline across its four designs, exceeding the evaluated L0-L2 designs. Additional review rounds or independent critics further improve average TB accuracy by up to 3.5 percentage points. Together, these results provide empirical guidance for verification design in agent harnesses and support independent review as a practical axis of test-time scaling.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Cowork-Gym: Synthesizing Interactive Work Environments at Scale

Cowork agents navigate dependencies across tools and files while adapting to changing user requirements and edits to shared workspaces. Scaling such environments requires maintaining consistency among task objectives, executable resources, user behavior, and success criteria. We introduce Cowork-Gym, a framework that synthesizes Cowork environments through a build-execute-revise loop that uses execution evidence and review feedback to validate and repair generated environments. To capture realistic Cowork dynamics, a stateful user simulator responds to the agent's actions through dialogue and direct edits to the shared workspace. We synthesize 64.9K environments across 14 application scenarios and use them to post-train 9B, 27B, and 35B-A3B Qwen models with supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation. Averaged across six agentic benchmarks, these models outperform their corresponding base checkpoints by 8.7, 6.4, and 4.1 points, respectively. Ours-27B ranks second overall among the evaluated models and achieves the highest average scores on PawBench and ClawEval, outperforming models with over 100B total parameters on both benchmarks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Playing social deduction games with reinforcement fine-tuned large language models

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) is increasingly used in applications where large language models (LLMs) interact with humans and other agents. Here we use social deduction games to study how RFT changes LLMs' social behaviour. We let fine-tuned and base LLM agents play hidden-role games that require hidden-state inference, social reading and vote steering. Our results show that LLM agents do not reliably acquire social-deduction ability by directly optimizing terminal win--loss outcomes, suggesting that final game results provide a sparse and noisy signal for socially interactive learning. However, RFT is particularly effective at improving social reading, including tasks that require agents to infer hidden roles from public discussion, update beliefs over time and predict other agents' future decisions. We further show that RFT can also improve social influence, including tasks that require agents to steer votes, team approvals and collective decisions, although these gains depend more strongly on behaviourally specific rewards and structured interaction settings. Finally, we show that LLMs' ability to play social deduction games can be further improved through multi-agent social-cognitive reinforcement fine-tuning, which combines social-reading and social-influence signals during same-side multi-agent training. These learned behaviours also receive more favourable human evaluations of strategic competence, persuasiveness and social usefulness. Together, these results enrich our understanding of how RFT changes LLMs' social behaviour and provide a step toward a behavioural learning theory for machine social intelligence.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Fine-Tuning on Self-Generated and Reward-Weighted Data: Learning Dynamics, Convergence Rates, and Benefits of Off-Policyness

We study the learning dynamics of fine-tuning a policy model on self-generated and reward-weighted data, with particular focus on a generalized version of REINFORCE -- referred to as RE(S) -- that updates the rollout distribution once every $S \ge 1$ gradient steps. Prior work in bandits and reinforcement learning has developed rich theory for policy gradient methods, and on-policy sampling (i.e., a small $S$, ideally $1$) is often viewed as crucial to their success; yet in prominent application like post-training large language models, reward-guided self-training has proved to be effective even when the rollout distribution is updated infrequently, but theoretical understanding remains limited for the convergence properties of these off-policy methods. To bridge these gaps, we develop a unified theory for RE(S) that covers the full spectrum of $S \ge 1$: it can be interpreted as a stage-wise optimization process, where each stage takes $S$ gradient steps for minimizing the Kullback-Leibler distance to a fixed reward-weighted rollout distribution. For multi-arm bandits with softmax policies, our in-depth analysis and numerical experiments reveal three key findings: (1) for any fixed $S$, RE(S) enjoys global convergence to the optimal policy as the number of rollout distribution updates $B = \lfloor T / S \rfloor \rightarrow \infty$, where $T$ denotes the number of gradient steps; (2) we prove tight two-sided bounds showing that the suboptimality gap of RE(S) achieves an asymptotic $Θ(1 / T)$ convergence rate, while $S$ only affects the length of a burn-in phase; (3) when initialized at a weak policy with a small optimal-action probability, RE(1) gets trapped around suboptimal policies for a long period, whereas RE(S) with a suitable $S$ avoids the detour and achieves significantly faster convergence to the global optimum, highlighting the benefits of off-policyness in this case.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning

This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation. We present proof-of-concept implementations of the CoD framework, including a GRPO-style RL algorithm with fine-grained credit assignment, as well as tasks and environments tailored to the targeted meta-capability (rather than domain-specific LLM capabilities or standard task-by-task RL). Empirical results with Qwen3-8B and Qwen3.6-27B validate the efficacy of end-to-end RL training in the CoD setting, and demonstrate the potential for out-of-distribution generalization -- within the training domains, across different domains, and from CoD to Ralph-loop settings -- of the elicited meta-capability. Our investigation of CoD connects several lines of prior work, and opens up new opportunities for advancing LLMs and AI agents. To facilitate further research and applications, we release our implementations at https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/research/cod_v2/examples/research_cod.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with that under privileged context, typically a verified solution. However, we show that the resulting distributional gap concentrates on style tokens rather than task-bearing ones, as the hinted model tends to produce shorter, more direct outputs. We term this pathology \emph{privilege-induced style drift}, which can destabilize training and shorten responses. To address this, we propose \textbf{RLCSD} (Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive on-policy Self-Distillation), which mitigates this drift by contrasting the teacher-student gap under a correct hint against that under a wrong hint, suppressing style shifts induced by hints regardless of correctness and yielding a signal more concentrated on task-bearing tokens. Experiments on Qwen3 (1.7B/4B/8B) and Olmo-3-7B-Think across mathematical and logical reasoning show that RLCSD consistently outperforms GRPO and prior OPSD methods, with additional results on agentic tasks supporting broader applicability. We further show that the contrastive principle is general: it plugs into existing OPSD methods to improve them, and its underlying insight extends to broader cross-model on-policy distillation.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Omni-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Audio-Visual Large Language Models

Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) that integrate visual, auditory, and textual processing face severe safety risks. They exhibit fragile defenses against audio-visual joint harmful inputs and demonstrate inconsistent safety performance across different modalities, enabling simple modality-switching jailbreaks. However, existing safety benchmarks fail to comprehensively assess these risks due to the absence of audio-visual joint samples, limited modality coverage, and lack of parallel test cases for cross-modal consistency evaluation. To address these gaps, we introduce Omni-SafetyBench, the first comprehensive parallel benchmark for OLLM safety evaluation, featuring 23,328 test instances across 24 modality variations derived from 972 seed samples. Recognizing that complex inputs pose comprehension challenges and that cross-modal consistency is critical for OLLM safety, we propose tailored metrics: a Safety-score based on Conditional Attack Success Rate (C-ASR) and Conditional Refusal Rate (C-RR), and a Cross-Modal Safety Consistency score (CMSC-score). Evaluating 11 state-of-the-art OLLMs reveals severe vulnerabilities: only 3 models exceed 0.6 in both metrics, with safety degrading sharply for audio-visual inputs. Furthermore, evaluation of existing safety alignment methods on Omni-SafetyBench identifies fundamental challenges in OLLM safety alignment, highlighting urgent needs for enhanced research in this domain.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Context as an Environment: Programmatic Context Management for Long-Horizon Agents

LLM agents increasingly take on long-running tasks whose history grows far beyond a single model context window. Existing approaches compress earlier interactions or extract selected information into fixed memory representations, committing to what to preserve before future needs are known. We present Scroll, a context manager that treats each agent session as an executable Session Environment. The environment is backed by an append-only Event Log and a sandboxed, persistent Python kernel. The kernel maintains a typed namespace across model calls, allowing tool outputs, retrieved history, and derived state to be bound to variables rather than serialized into the prompt at each call. Model-written code searches, materializes, and transforms session state through exec; only explicitly printed projections enter the model's working view for the next call. Context management thus becomes a programming task that inherits the improving coding abilities of LLMs, while the Event Log preserves lossless historical ground truth. As the working view approaches its budget, stale spans are evicted but remain recoverable: an eviction index keeps compact landmarks tied to exact Event Log addresses, so that the agent navigates directly to evicted regions instead of searching the full log. With Qwen3.8-Max as the backbone, Scroll achieves 94.8% on LongMemEval_S; 73.1% on BEAM_10M, surpassing the best published memory system by 5.1 points; and 86.7% on LOCA_256K, exceeding the best published long-horizon agent by 37.4 points.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Private Direct Preference Optimization for LLM Alignment

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is now a standard method for aligning large language models (LLMs) using human preference data. Each DPO example contains a prompt and a pair of candidate model responses. While prompts and responses are often public or model-generated, the relative preference between responses reflects subjective judgments and can reveal sensitive attributes of annotators or end users. Off-the-shelf privacy-preserving approaches are not well matched to this structure, leading to unnecessary noise injection and biased updates in training. In this paper, we formalize preference privacy, a label-DP-style privacy notion for DPO that protects only the relative preference between candidate responses, assuming an adversary who already knows the prompt and responses. We then design PrivDPO, a DPO variant that enforces preference privacy while remaining compatible with large-scale LLM training. Our main observation is that, for neighboring examples differing only in their preference signal, the gradient difference lies on a one-dimensional preference axis determined solely by the text; all preference information flows through this axis. PrivDPO adds calibrated randomness only along this axis via an unbiased randomized rescaling of the DPO objective, avoiding per-example gradient operations. Our experiments on three alignment benchmarks and three LLM families show that PrivDPO consistently achieves strong privacy-utility trade-offs compared with privacy-preserving baselines.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2026

MolSight: A Graph-Aware Vision-Language Model for Unified Chemical Image Understanding

Using molecular large language models (LLMs) as a unified framework for understanding molecular structures and functions is emerging as a new trend in tasks such as molecular design and drug discovery. However, these models struggle to fully capture the visual representation of molecular structures, limiting their potential. While existing molecular vision-language models (VLMs) show promise, they still face challenges in structural alignment and lack the necessary topological modeling for accurate molecular understanding. To address this, we propose MolSight, a graph-aware vision-language model framework designed to enhance the understanding of molecular images by VLMs. MolSight integrates a Molecular Topology Module to inject chemical-bond adjacency information into vision tokens, and a Molecular Grounding Module to align visual features with chemical symbolic semantics. Our experiments demonstrate that MolSight significantly outperforms existing VLMs, molecular LLMs, and task-specific models across multiple chemical visual understanding tasks, achieving a new level of molecular image reasoning in complex chemical scenarios.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

ReDiSC: A Reparameterized Masked Diffusion Model for Scalable Node Classification with Structured Predictions

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNN) have achieved unprecedented successes in node classification tasks. Although GNNs inherently encode specific inductive biases (e.g., acting as low-pass or high-pass filters), most existing methods implicitly assume conditional independence among node labels in their optimization objectives. While this assumption is suitable for traditional classification tasks such as image recognition, it contradicts the intuitive observation that node labels in graphs remain correlated, even after conditioning on the graph structure. To make structured predictions for node labels, we propose ReDiSC, namely, Reparameterized masked Diffusion model for Structured node Classification. ReDiSC estimates the joint distribution of node labels using a reparameterized masked diffusion model, which is learned through the variational expectation-maximization (EM) framework. Our theoretical analysis shows the efficiency advantage of ReDiSC in the E-step compared to DPM-SNC, a state-of-the-art model that relies on a manifold-constrained diffusion model in continuous domain. Meanwhile, we explicitly link ReDiSC's M-step objective to popular GNN and label propagation hybrid approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReDiSC achieves superior or highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art GNN, label propagation, and diffusion-based baselines across both homophilic and heterophilic graphs of varying sizes. Notably, ReDiSC scales effectively to large-scale datasets on which previous structured diffusion methods fail due to computational constraints, highlighting its significant practical advantage in structured node classification tasks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

AgentJet: A Distributed Swarm Training Framework for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies for large language model (LLM) agents requires optimizing multi-turn trajectories that interact with external environments. Existing training frameworks struggle with runtime failures, single-model constraints, incompatible task environments, and redundant context. We present AgentJet, a distributed swarm training framework based on a decoupled multi-node architecture. AgentJet treats the server--client topology as configurable: swarm servers host trainable models and perform optimization on GPU clusters, while detachable swarm clients execute arbitrary agents and communicate through OpenAI-compatible APIs. Reconfiguring this topology supports heterogeneous multi-model RL, mixed-task training with isolated runtimes, fault-tolerant execution, and live code iteration through hot-swappable clients. AgentJet also introduces context tracking with timeline merging, reducing actor-update time by 6.25x on AppWorld. The same detachable-client design supports an automated research system that conducts long-horizon, multi-day RL studies on large-scale clusters with limited human intervention. AgentJet is open-source and compatible with agent systems that issue standard LLM inference requests.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

QwenPaw-Data: Bridging Facts, Methodology, and Execution for Autonomous Enterprise Data Analytics

Enterprise data analysis is emerging as a distinct frontier for autonomous agents. Compared with general-purpose interaction and software engineering, it operates in an open, ambiguous, and continuously evolving environment. These characteristics call for a data-agent architecture that treats semantics, methodology, execution, and evolution as first-class system concerns. To this end, we introduce QwenPaw-Data, an agentic data system designed for enterprise intelligent data analysis. QwenPaw-Data consolidates heterogeneous assets from warehouses, dashboards, documents, interaction logs, and historical tasks into reusable, governable, and evolvable analysis assets, then turns natural-language requests into end-to-end analytical workflows spanning data understanding, retrieval, analysis, report generation, and decision support. Its architecture decomposes the problem into three collaborative subsystems: DataBridge provides trustworthy semantic grounding through interconnected metadata, knowledge, and trace graphs; Skill-Hub codifies expert analytical methodology into reusable and verifiable skills; and Host materializes these evidence and method assets into controllable, artifact-centric runtime execution. Across these subsystems, semantics, methods, traces, and feedback are continuously deposited back into the system, forming a self-evolving asset flywheel. Experiments on public benchmarks and real-world industrial BI workloads show that QwenPaw-Data improves both verifiable data access capability and higher-level analytical quality, offering a practical foundation for reliable, traceable, and continuously improving enterprise data agents.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

From Atomic Actions to Standard Operating Procedures: Iterative Tool Optimization for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Tool utilization enables Large Language Model (LLM) agents to interact with the real world and resolve complex tasks. However, existing agent frameworks predominantly rely on static toolsets composed of granular atomic actions (e.g., basic file I/O or single-turn search), which forces agents to reinvent low-level logic for every recurring workflow, leading to increased reasoning overhead and failure rates. In this study, we propose that agents can achieve self-evolution by synthesizing these atomic actions into reusable Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), which function as callable higher-order tools that encapsulate multi-step logic. We further introduce EvoSOP, a framework that empowers agents to extract SOPs from execution trajectories and iteratively optimize the toolset through a systematic lifecycle of construction, merging, evaluation, and pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoSOP significantly boosts task success rates while substantially reducing the number of interaction rounds compared to baselines. Our analysis also reveals that iterative tool optimization fosters reliable and efficient tool-use patterns, providing a scalable pathway for the development of self-evolving agents.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Domains: Reusing Web Skills via Transferable Interaction Patterns

Large language model (LLM) web agents are usually deployed as tool callers: each turn, the model reads a fresh page observation and emits one structured tool action. When every action is a low-level primitive, horizons grow quickly and so do policy-facing LLM completions, dominating latency and cost on benchmarks such as Mind2Web and WebArena. Recent systems therefore wrap repeated interaction fragments as web skills: callable tools built from successful trajectories or induced programs, so one call can replace several primitives. However, prior skill libraries are still triggered mainly by instruction similarity or coarse site metadata, which yields low skill reuse on held-out sites and leaves much of the potential step and token reduction on the table. We present SkillMigrator, an agent that learns reusable web skills and transfers them across sites by matching layout structure rather than specific element references. Each induced skill is stored as a transferable interaction pattern (TIP): the skill paired with a structural sketch of the snapshot at induction time. At test time, SkillMigrator retrieves TIPs by layout similarity and grounds their references on the live page. The rest of the stack is standard: accessibility-snapshot observations with stable references, and fixed tool calling over primitives plus skill invocations. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, SkillMigrator reduces the average LLM-action count on successful trajectories by 8-10% across both WebArena and Mind2Web at matched success rate.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Voting with the Graph: Stable RLAIF via Topological Consistency Maximization

Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) relies on LLM judges as preference measurement instruments, yet these instruments are fundamentally limited by random measurement errors -- stochastic fluctuations that manifest as preference cycles (e.g., $A \succ B \succ C \succ A$), occurring in 5-9% of evaluations across state-of-the-art models. While repeated sampling mitigates noise by averaging multiple judgments, it treats each comparison in isolation and fails to exploit the structural constraints that distinguish systematic signals from random noise. We introduce Topological Consensus Rewards (TCR), a framework that leverages transitivity as a denoising mechanism via topological majority voting: systematic signals reinforce each other through transitive chains, while random errors cluster into topologically exposed cycles. TCR approximates the Maximum Acyclic Subgraph to filter stochastic noise from preference signals. We also propose Cycle Incidence Rate (CIR) as a diagnostic metric that measures the proportion of samples containing preference cycles. Under our noise model, these cycles arise primarily from stochastic measurement errors rather than genuine intransitivity. Experiments on Arena-Hard, MT-Bench, and WritingBench demonstrate that TCR consistently outperforms pairwise baselines and classical ranking algorithms, while exhibiting robust performance across different judge models.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Clipping Bottleneck: Stabilizing RLVR via Stochastic Recovery of Near-Boundary Signals

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a central paradigm for scaling LLM reasoning, yet its optimization often suffers from training instability and suboptimal convergence. Through a systematic dissection of clipping-based GRPO-style objectives, we identify the rigid clipping decision induced by hard clipping as a key practical bottleneck in the studied RLVR setups. Specifically, our analysis suggests that informative signals can lie in the near-boundary region just beyond the clipping threshold, and are therefore discarded by the standard hard-clipping rule. Notably, once this bottleneck is precisely identified, even simple stochastic perturbations at the boundary can recover meaningful performance gains. Building on this finding, we propose Near-boundary Stochastic Rescue (NSR), a minimal, plug-and-play modification that stochastically retains these slightly out-of-bound tokens to recover lost signals. While NSR, via stochastic sampling, can be interpreted as inducing an implicit gradient decay in expectation, our ablations reveal that its stochastic, boundary-local rescue mechanism is consistently more effective than deterministic gradient decay. Validated by extensive experiments across model sizes from 7B to 30B and both dense and MoE architectures, as a plug-and-play solution, NSR substantially improves training stability and delivers consistent gains over strong baselines such as DAPO and GSPO.

cs.LG↗