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Jia Li

Publications and source records attributed to Jia Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, raising concerns that they may be misused to produce malicious code. Meanwhile, Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) has been widely adopted to improve the reliability of LLM-generated code by enforcing syntactic validity. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive risk: this reliability-oriented technique can itself become an attack surface. We uncover a new jailbreak attack, termed CodeSpear, that exploits GCD to induce LLMs into generating malicious code. Our experiments show that simply applying a benign code grammar constraint can effectively jailbreak LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose CodeShield, a safety alignment approach that robustly preserves safe behavior even under attacker-controlled grammar constraints. CodeShield aligns the model in the code modality by teaching it to generate honeypot code under GCD. Such code is semantically harmless, so it does not implement the malicious request, and structurally diverse, so it is difficult to suppress through grammar tightening. At the same time, CodeShield still preserves natural-language refusals when natural language is available. Experiments on 10 popular LLMs across 4 benchmarks show that CodeSpear outperforms representative jailbreak baselines and increases the attack success rate by more than 30 percentage points on average. CodeShield also restores safety under CodeSpear while preserving benign utility. Our findings reveal a fundamental risk of GCD and call for greater attention to its potential security implications.

cs.CR↗

Safe Actions Alone Do Not Ensure Safe Agents: Identifying Unfulfilled Obligations with Guard Models

Guard models are increasingly used to safeguard LLM-based agents, primarily by identifying actions that agents are forbidden to perform. However, identifying forbidden actions alone is insufficient to ensure agent safety. In this paper, we argue that agent safety also depends on identifying required yet unperformed safety-critical actions, which we call obligations. Our preliminary study on a popular benchmark for evaluating safety shows that 56.92% of GLM-5.3 trajectories contain unfulfilled obligations, compared with only 30.00% containing forbidden actions. This finding reveals unfulfilled obligations as a major and previously overlooked source of safety risk. However, to our knowledge, no existing benchmark evaluates whether guard models can identify these obligations. To close this gap, we introduce ObligationBench, the first benchmark for evaluating the capability of obligation identification, comprising 240 expert-validated trajectories covering issue resolution, feature development, and terminal operations. Our evaluation of 14 representative models reveals substantial limitations: the highest recall and exact-match rate are only 48.97% and 10.00%, respectively. To address these limitations, we develop ObligationGuard using 40,000 synthetic training examples. ObligationGuard achieves 57.52% recall and an exact-match rate of 21.67%, surpassing all evaluated models on both metrics. We call on the community to incorporate obligation identification into the design and evaluation of future guard models to improve agent safety.

cs.AI↗

AffToM: Benchmarking Recursive Affective Theory of Mind in Dynamic Multi-Party Interactions

Understanding emotion in realistic social interactions requires more than recognizing facial expressions or assigning affective labels. The same event can elicit different emotions depending on what each participant knows, what they believe others know or feel, and how these nested mental states evolve over time. Existing benchmarks largely study higher-order epistemic Theory of Mind (ToM) and multimodal emotion reasoning in isolation, leaving recursive affective reasoning under asymmetric and dynamically changing information underexplored. Therefore, we introduce AffToM, a benchmark for affective ToM with 1,922 test pairs and 19,759 training pairs. AffToM evaluates Individual Affective Reasoning (IAR), which infers emotions from events and socio-cognitive context, and Multi-party Affective Reasoning (MPAR), which recursively tracks participants' nested beliefs and emotions as new evidence emerges. We develop an event-driven multi-agent generation pipeline grounded in dynamic character interaction graphs that explicitly capture event sequences, interpersonal relations, and mental-state updates. Furthermore, we propose AffToM-R1, a two-stage post-training framework combining supervised fine-tuning with perspective-aware rubric-guided reinforcement learning. Experiments show that MPAR remains challenging, with even the strongest evaluated MLLM achieving less than 60% accuracy, while AffToM-R1 improves MPAR accuracy by 13.38 percentage points over its base model. Our dataset is available at: https://github.com/MindIntLab-HFUT/AffToM.

cs.AI↗

Can Coding Agents Sustain Continual Evolution without Forgetting?

Recently, harness self-evolution has emerged as an important paradigm for improving agent performance. Prior studies show that evolving the agent harness can effectively enhance agent capabilities without modifying the foundation model's parameters. We find that existing approaches largely study agent evolution on a single task. In practice, coding agents may need to handle multiple task types over time. Whether an agent harness can continuously evolve across multiple tasks without suffering from catastrophic forgetting remains an important open question. In this paper, we investigate this open question through a comprehensive empirical study of continual harness self-evolution. We organize three software engineering task datasets into six different evolution directions and apply two representative harness evolution methods to perform continual evolution along these directions. Our experimental results show that evolution on a subsequent dataset can substantially undermine the performance on previously seen datasets. For example, with DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731, Meta-Harness improves its performance on SWE-Bench to 94.0% after evolution. However, after further evolution on FeatureBench, its performance on SWE-Bench drops to 32.0% by the fifth round, corresponding to a 66% relative decrease. Finally, based on our experimental findings, we identify several insights, providing directions for the continual self-evolution of agent harnesses. Code is available at https://github.com/THU-Agent/continual-harness-evolution.

cs.SE↗

ScienceCUA: Resource-to-Skill Construction and Execution-Guided Skill Evolution for Scientific Computer Use Agents

Computer-use agents for scientific software require application-specific expertise. Much of this expertise is documented in human-authored software manuals and web pages. However, turning these resources into executable, reusable skills remains challenging due to mismatches between documented and deployed software versions and differences in scope between documentation coverage and task requirements. We introduce ScienceCUA, a two-stage framework combining resource-to-skill construction with execution-guided skill evolution. First, ScienceCUA identifies tasks supported by the software from its documentation, infers operational trajectories, and generalizes them into reusable Skills. Command catalogs, syntax constraints, and shortcuts are organized separately as References for on-demand lookup. Then, ScienceCUA uses execution feedback to drive skill self-evolution by contrasting successful and failed trajectories for the same task, identifying deficiencies, revising existing skills or adding new ones, and updating the skill library only after repeated validation in real environments. To enable reliable evaluation without benchmark noise or task leakage, we introduce two improved benchmarks. ScienceBoard-Verified provides an audited and corrected basis for measuring task performance, while ScienceBoard-VE separates skill evolution from final testing through disjoint evolution and test tasks and further supports native-agent evaluation. Experiments show that the initial Skills and References improve average task success rate by up to 7.23 percentage points over the base model, while skill self-evolution increases the total gain over the baseline to as much as 17.12 percentage points. ScienceCUA turns software documentation into an evolving set of executable skills and queryable references, offering a practical way for general-purpose agents to use scientific software reliably and at scale.

cs.AI↗

Equidistant Affine Subspaces: Explicit Bounds, Structural Reductions, Transverse Products, and Fixed-Codimension Stability

Let $\mathcal{N}(k,n)$ be the largest size of a family of affine $k$-planes in $\R^n$ at pairwise separation distance one. We develop a unified treatment of upper bounds, dimension reduction, product constructions, and fixed-codimension stability. Orthogonal-projection coordinates give a rank-stratified distance identity; a Veronese lifting converts its polynomial consequences into simultaneous total isotropy. Connected Nash decomposition and an analytic diagonal argument yield an explicit bound \[ \mathcal{N}(k,n)\leqslant 2^{\,2^{\,3(k+1)(n-k)}}. \] For configurations whose direction sums have dimension at most $k+1$, we prove the exact reduction $\mathcal{N}_{\leqslant k+1}(k,n)=\mathcal{N}(1,n-k+1)$. Every codimension-two configuration splits off a common linear factor, so $\mathcal{N}(n-2,n)=\mathcal{N}(1,3)$. A transverse product construction gives multiplicative inequalities. We further prove that for every fixed codimension $c$, the sequence $\mathcal{N}(k,k+c)$ is eventually constant. In codimension three, a sharper normal-span argument gives \[ \mathcal{N}(k,k+3)=\mathcal{N}(7,10)\qquad(k\geqslant7), \] where the numerical threshold uses the computer-assisted theorem $\mathcal{N}(1,3)=7$. The structural and stability results are otherwise independent of that numerical input.

math.MG↗

Learning-to-Memorize: Dynamic Context Management for Long-Horizon Autoregressive Video Generation

Autoregressive video generation has achieved impressive results on short clips, yet generating long videos remains challenging due to error accumulation over extended horizons, where each predicted frame depends on potentially imperfect previous frames. Existing approaches typically rely on static context management strategies, such as sliding-window caches that discard early frames or fixed sink frames that permanently preserve initial content. These designs either lose critical long-range context or anchor generation to outdated information, which can lead to degraded fidelity, motion stagnation, and reduced diversity. In this paper, we propose Learning to Memorize (L2M), a learned context memory management framework that dynamically retains, evicts, and evolves historical frames according to predicted importance. The framework consists of an importance prediction router that estimates the relevance of each historical frame, degradation-aware training that improves robustness to noisy or corrupted context, and a dynamic memory initialization and evolution mechanism that updates long-term memory using exponential moving average (EMA) importance scores. This allows high-quality frames to replace stale anchors and enables memory to adapt naturally to scene evolution. Trained with a teacher-student distillation objective and sparsity regularization, L2M makes efficient use of a fixed KV-cache budget while preserving the most informative contextual information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that L2M improves long-horizon video generation quality and temporal consistency over existing baselines, providing a learned strategy for context memory management in long autoregressive video generation.

cs.CV↗

Information Design for Behaviorally Stable Platooning

Voluntary platoon formation requires vehicles to coordinate despite uncertain downstream fuel savings and private joining incentives. We study whether an informed operator can encourage participation by designing a public disclosure rule. A finite-vehicle coordination game links physical fuel savings to vehicles' joining decisions under two information environments: private joining costs and private observations of the common corridor state. Private costs yield a posterior-mean participation response, while private observations require richer posterior information and create correlated formation outcomes. We formulate persuasive disclosure problems and develop computational methods for both regimes. In a literature-anchored reference scenario, optimized two-message disclosure supports participation of 8.74% and 51.83%, respectively, compared with zero without disclosure and 5.15% and 39.27% under full disclosure. Gains concentrate in intermediate opportunities, depend on joining-cost calibration, and need not maximize welfare. Numerical sensitivity and trajectory checks quantify these effects. All gains are conditional on favorable symmetric equilibrium selection: public information alone cannot eliminate the no-participation equilibrium when joining requires a costly commitment without a guaranteed partner.

cs.GT↗

EvoMemBench: Benchmarking Agent Memory from a Self-Evolving Perspective

Recent benchmarks for Large Language Model (LLM) agents mainly evaluate reasoning, planning, and execution. However, memory is also essential for agents, as it enables them to store, update, and retrieve information over time. This ability remains under-evaluated, largely because existing benchmarks do not provide a systematic way to assess memory mechanisms. In this paper, we study agent memory from a self-evolving perspective and introduce EvoMemBench, a unified benchmark organized along two axes: memory scope (in-episode vs. cross-episode) and memory content (knowledge-oriented vs. execution-oriented). We compare 15 representative memory methods with strong long-context baselines under a standardized protocol. Results show that current memory systems are still far from a general solution: long-context baselines remain highly competitive, memory helps most when the current context is insufficient or tasks are difficult, and no single memory form works consistently across all settings. Retrieval-based methods remain strong for knowledge-intensive settings, whereas procedural and long-term memory methods are more effective for execution-oriented tasks when their stored experience matches the task structure. We hope EvoMemBench facilitates future research on more effective memory systems for LLM-based agents. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/DSAIL-Memory/EvoMemBench.

cs.CL↗

Understanding LLM-Based Bargaining of Driving Agents in Mixed-Autonomy Traffic

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a flexible computational approach for modeling social interactions among heterogeneous agents. This paper develops a novel framework towards characterizing and understanding LLM-based population-level bargaining of shared road space between autonomous vehicle (AV) and human-driven vehicle (HV) agents in mixed-autonomy traffic. Through controlled experiments varying traffic density, agent objectives, and traffic-domain knowledge, we first characterize bargaining outcomes and observe heterogeneous agreement rates across different experimental conditions. To understand how the bargaining process shapes the outcomes, we introduce a behavioral taxonomy that jointly characterizes numerical bidding actions and communicative attitudes. We examine two complementary aspects of social interaction: inter-agent bargaining dynamics and private-to-public behavioral transformation. Results reveal distinct interaction patterns associated with agreement and breakdown, including greater constructive reciprocity in agreement trials and more frequent conflict escalation in breakdown trials. Furthermore, private and public communicative attitudes often differ even when numerical bids remain unchanged. These findings illustrate how LLM-based bargaining simulations can support a structured analysis of social interaction behaviors in mixed-autonomy traffic.

physics.soc-ph↗

FARO: Function-Space Adaptive Return-to-Risk Optimization via Cross-Block Equal-Risk-Contribution Budget Allocation

Training a large language model is compute-bound, and current recipes divide the work between optimizers by hand: orthogonalized momentum for attention and MLP matrices, Adam-style updates for the rest. This division rests on human priors about which layer type deserves which geometry, and it fixes a single global update budget that every parameter block shares. We introduce FARO, a function-space adaptive optimizer that makes the partition of parameters into blocks the unit of decision. FARO gives each block a geometry by its realized counterfactual return, then freezes the routes and reallocates the frozen per-block budget by cross-block equal risk contribution (ERC), the risk-parity principle from portfolio theory. On a GPT-style model trained on FineWeb, the framework gives two results. First, its FARO-Adaptive arm reaches 3.2780 nats at the full schedule, matching NorMuonAndAdam (3.2794), the best hand-designed recipe: it recovers the human prior without hand-setting per-layer geometry. Second, FARO-ERC improves on that arm: it lowers the clean-data loss at every one of 6 seeds, by 0.0136 nats on average, a modest but robust gain. Its sign test, paired test, and confidence interval all agree, and it exceeds the measured run-to-run noise at no added time or memory. It works by trimming the riskiest blocks rather than expanding the safest, and it holds up under a corrupted stream, still lowering the mean loss and winning the seed majority. The source code is available at https://github.com/wxj630/FARO.

cs.LG↗

ASNER: Software Architecture Recovery with Adaptive Semantic Neighborhoods and Evidence-Grounded Refinement

Automated software architecture recovery provides architectural context for software engineering and repository-level LLM agents. Existing methods combine structural and semantic signals, but functional relatedness does not necessarily imply shared architectural responsibility. Fixed thresholds or Top-K neighborhoods also ignore repository scale and local similarity distributions, introducing errors that propagate through clustering. Unconstrained LLM refinement may further alter correct assignments without sufficient evidence. We propose ASNER (Adaptive Semantic Neighborhoods and Evidence-Grounded Refinement for Software Architecture Recovery), based on responsibility-aware, project-adaptive relation modeling and evidence-grounded boundary verification. ASNER derives structured file responsibilities with an LLM, constructs semantic neighborhoods that adapt to repository scale and local similarity distributions, and augments a static dependency graph with selected semantic relations and weak directory cues. Community detection recovers the component backbone. A Responsibility-Ownership-Aware (ROA) Agent then examines uncertain boundary files using project-level responsibilities and traceable code evidence, changing assignments only when supported. Experiments on 12 open-source projects spanning C, C++, Java, and Python show that ASNER achieves the best macro-average on all five metrics on the common benchmark, improving ARI and c2c@66 over GAER-GAT by 19.5% and 32.9%, respectively. A downstream evaluation shows that ASNER-guided LocAgent improves file-, module-, and function-level code localization, demonstrating the value of its architectural context for repository-level software engineering tasks.

cs.SE↗

FICGen: Frequency-Inspired Contextual Disentanglement for Layout-driven Degraded Image Generation

Layout-to-image (L2I) generation has exhibited promising results in natural domains, but suffers from limited generative fidelity and weak alignment with user-provided layouts when applied to degraded scenes (i.e., low-light, underwater). We primarily attribute these limitations to the "contextual illusion dilemma" in degraded conditions, where foreground instances are overwhelmed by context-dominant frequency distributions. Motivated by this, our paper proposes a new Frequency-Inspired Contextual Disentanglement Generative (FICGen) paradigm, which seeks to transfer frequency knowledge of degraded images into the latent diffusion space, thereby facilitating the rendering of degraded instances and their surroundings via contextual frequency-aware guidance. To be specific, FICGen consists of two major steps. Firstly, we introduce a learnable dual-query mechanism, each paired with a dedicated frequency resampler, to extract contextual frequency prototypes from pre-collected degraded exemplars in the training set. Secondly, a visual-frequency enhanced attention is employed to inject frequency prototypes into the degraded generation process. To alleviate the contextual illusion and attribute leakage, an instance coherence map is developed to regulate latent-space disentanglement between individual instances and their surroundings, coupled with an adaptive spatial-frequency aggregation module to reconstruct spatial-frequency mixed degraded representations. Extensive experiments on 5 benchmarks involving a variety of degraded scenarios-from severe low-light to mild blur-demonstrate that FICGen consistently surpasses existing L2I methods in terms of generative fidelity, alignment and downstream auxiliary trainability.

cs.CV↗

UnityBench-Mini3D: Evaluating LLM Agents for 3D Game Development in Unity

Game development stresses coding agents in ways general software engineering does not: correctness depends on how engine APIs, serialized scene state, and runtime behavior interact, not on source code alone. Existing benchmarks mainly target platforms such as Godot and heavily rely on LLM judges or coarse task-level outcomes. We present UnityBench-Mini3D, a benchmark of 77 project-level Unity tasks organized around seven expert-defined skill categories rather than tutorials or genres, with three difficulty tiers. Each task pairs a complete Unity project with natural-language requirements and is evaluated using 1,178 held-out, human-authored milestone tests covering scene structure, component configuration, and runtime behavior. This in-engine evaluation provides deterministic partial credit, localizes failures, and distinguishes partial implementations from complete solutions without relying on subjective judges. Across 21 models and 9 coding harnesses, the average pass rate reaches 80.9% on easy tasks but falls to 35.2% on hard tasks, with just 57.7% overall. UnityBench-Mini3D provides a reproducible, diagnostic testbed distinguishing systems across difficulty levels.

cs.SE↗

MimicAll: Structured Embodiment Conditioning for Cross-Humanoid Whole-Body Motion Tracking

Humanoid motion trackers reproduce diverse behaviors, but sharing a policy across bodies requires accounting for differences in structure, morphology and dynamics. We present MimicAll, a reinforcement-learning framework for shared whole-body motion tracking across heterogeneous humanoids. A structured embodiment descriptor is encoded into global and joint-aligned conditions, which are combined with observation history and body-matched motion references to predict joint-target offsets. Physics-consistent embodiment randomization, body-calibrated retargeting and heterogeneous simulation support training across 4,096 variants from 16 humanoid families. We introduce a benchmark of 464 bodies across five distribution strata to evaluate motion generalization, within-family embodiment shifts and unseen-family transfer. Controlled ablations show that embodiment information improves motion completion with simple concatenation, while self-attention yields the lowest global position errors. With equal training transitions, shared training achieves 99.4% 30-second success on randomized G1 bodies in 100STYLE, versus 42.9% for a single-body specialist. With Flat-MLP encoding and concatenation, continued training on a motion subset excluding obstacle categories achieves 98.3% and 93.5% 30-second success on 100STYLE for sampled training bodies and out-of-distribution variants within seen families, respectively. On an eight-motion LAFAN1 subset excluding ground and get-up sequences across 464 bodies, mismatched body conditions reduce self-attention's 30-second success from 61.7% to 47.0%, demonstrating a closed-loop benefit from embodiment information.

cs.RO↗

Numina Fuse: Interactive Autoformalization in Lean 4

Numina Fuse is an agent-native application for formalizing mathematics in Lean 4. Since Lean can compile while not representing its intended informal meaning, and agents now write Lean faster than people can read it, we built Fuse around human supervision of agent work. A user works with an AI orchestrator on a Lean project and supervises it through views of the blueprint, the dependency graph, and the Lean code, while the backend keeps the project's derived state and runs agents for hours without the user present. We describe the development of Fuse throughout 2026, as it moved from a prescribed pipeline of agents paced by human review to an orchestrator that dispatches specialists, provers, and parallel children on its own. We designed for this shift, keeping project state, tooling, and interface design separate from orchestration so that agents could take over more of the work as models improved. We report Fuse's use in a formalization of the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture and a study of prover models. We close with lessons for the next generation of autoformalization systems. Fuse Desktop, an open-source local version, is available at https://github.com/project-numina/fuse-desktop.

cs.AI↗

DMAIC-Bench: From Self-Reflection to Self-Restraint for Agents in Multi-Stage Analytical Tasks

Multi-stage analytical tasks require LLM agents to use intermediate evidence to decide whether to continue, redirect or stop. Self-reflection, in which an agent critiques its output, is widely studied, yet a critique does not show whether evidence changed the next action. We call that capability self-restraint. Existing agent benchmarks largely measure task completion or output quality and leave it untested. DMAIC-Bench evaluates it with 97 seeded tasks across 15 industrial cases in four sectors, built around Lean Six Sigma's explicit statistical prerequisites. Paired counterfactual variants require opposite actions at the same workflow position, distinguishing warranted restraint from indiscriminate stopping. We assess execution traces with a private scorer and final claims through independent expert review. Across 13 models from six providers, execution-level routing accuracy averages 92% on matched GO decisions and 19% on NO-GO decisions, counting any forbidden downstream computation as a route error. Execution traces show agents reporting correct diagnostics before performing analyses that those results disallow. Separately, blinded expert review of the 11 audited agents estimates that reports act on invalid evidence at 47% of reached NO-GO decisions, with an interval from 31% to 61%. Explicit stopping permission helps some models without consistently restoring correct decisions at both GO and NO-GO forks. Sixteen life-sciences tasks in bulk ribonucleic acid sequencing (RNA-seq) and case-control genome-wide association studies (GWAS) show that the same framework can evaluate evidence-dependent decisions beyond industrial workflows. Project code and data are available at: https://github.com/psptpx/DMAIC-Bench-public.

cs.AI↗

POSEIDON: Scaling Training Environments for Scientific Agents from Code Repositories

Training environments remain a major bottleneck for agents in data-driven scientific discovery. Existing collections of executable and verifiable training environments are small, and their construction remains difficult to scale. To address this limitation, we introduce Poseidon, an automated pipeline for generating diverse, verifiable training environments from scientific code repositories at scale. From the same repository budget, Poseidon extracts nearly 10 times as many training environments as a prior approach by decomposing scientific workflows into four complementary task types: Reproduction, Subflow, Completion, and Correction, where each type targets a distinct capability for scientific research. A recursive improvement loop further refines failed candidates and recovers otherwise discarded environments. Using Poseidon, we construct Pearl, a collection of 97,659 executable and verifiable environments from 7,110 public repositories spanning 10 scientific disciplines. To the best of our knowledge, Pearl is the largest and most broadly multidisciplinary collection of scientific-agent training environments to date. Qwen3.5 models (9B, 27B, and 35B-A3B) trained on Pearl achieve consistent gains across six challenging scientific-agent benchmarks. Overall, the scale and diversity of Pearl offer opportunities for training scientific discovery agents.

cs.AI↗