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Rui Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Rui Yang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

VDGR-RAG: Vectors, Directories, Graphs, and Reflection Are All You Need for Unified Reasoning over Hierarchical Enterprise Knowledge

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is essential for enterprise knowledge question answering (QA), particularly in domains with complex product documentation like telecommunications. However, existing RAG approaches largely overlook the holistic integration of diverse retrieval strengths, leading to inaccurate domain routing, poor utilization of hierarchical document structures, and consequently limited reasoning capabilities over enterprise knowledge. To address these limitations, we present VDGR-RAG, which integrates vector retrieval, directory-driven reasoning, graph traversal, and iterative reflection in a unified framework for accurate enterprise knowledge QA. Specifically, VDGR-RAG is an agentic GraphRAG system that first constructs a Hierarchical Heterogeneous Knowledge Graph ($\text{H}^2$KG) from document chunks to preserve both hierarchical directory structures and semantic relationships, and then employs a set of atomic tools for knowledge retrieval that can be freely composed to navigate the $\text{H}^2$KG: (1) a directory-enhanced routing tool that uses table-of-contents (TOC) structures to route user queries to appropriate domain-specific $\text{H}^2$KGs; (2) a multi-route retrieval tool that combines vector search, TOC-based agentic search, and graph search for comprehensive knowledge retrieval; (3) a directory backtracking tool that corrects knowledge localization biases; and (4) a dynamic reflection tool that iteratively plans the next retrieval phase. We conduct extensive experiments on our enterprise product documents across four wireless domains (e.g., energy saving and fault management). Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms a variety of RAG baselines in terms of both knowledge retrieval recall and QA accuracy.

cs.AI↗

AsyncWebRL: Efficient Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Visual Web Agents

Training vision-language web agents with multi-step RL is compute-intensive, with two dominant forms of inefficiency: idle GPUs in synchronous RL, and trajectories that use more steps and tokens than necessary. We present AsyncWebRL, which addresses both. On the system side, an asynchronous design overlaps rollout, gradient update, and policy refresh across iterations, paired with two web-agent-specific adaptations, namely an everlasting rollout pool and lightweight screenshot handling, that together deliver up to a $2.9\times$ end-to-end training-throughput speedup over the previously fastest open synchronous pipeline (WebGym). On the algorithmic side, we identify the per-trajectory normalizer $1/|τ_i|$ in multi-step GRPO as the root cause of trajectory-level and token-level inefficiency: because failures are systematically longer than successes, it down-weights the negative gradient on failed tokens, so the policy keeps producing verbose memory schemas. Replacing $1/|τ_i|$ with a constant $1/k$ breaks this coupling, contracting trajectories while preserving aggregate success. Together, these contributions set a new open-source state of the art on the WebGym out-of-distribution test split (+5.8% relative over the 42.9% prior best), with the largest gains on the harder slices (+42% relative on Medium, +48% relative on Hard).

cs.LG↗

Towards a Risk Assessment of Malicious Skill Files in Coding Agents

Autonomous coding agents are increasingly embedded in enterprise software workflows with delegated authority over connected systems. Central to this architecture is the agent skills interface: folders of instructions and scripts that agents load dynamically to specialize their behavior. This interface also widens the attack surface, letting malicious shell commands hide within natural-language skill files. We make three contributions. First, an adversarial skill-synthesis method using six LLMs across four families to transform 471 real-world shell commands into benign-appearing skills, released as a benchmark of 2,826 skills mapped to 11 MITRE ATT&CK tactics. Second, a reproducible evaluation pipeline coupling run stratification, evidence anchoring, a refusal veto, and a deterministic declared-intent override with a three-judge LLM-as-a-judge panel, validated against a blind human gold standard (Cohen's kappa = 0.85). Third, a large-scale characterization of two enterprise-grade agents across 5,629 completed runs. Gemini CLI is exploited in 95.5-96.1% of runs and Qwen Code in 71.6-74.0% (raw majority vote to declared-intent-corrected estimate, both within the human gold standard), nearly invariant to the generating model. Explicit safety recognition occurs in only 1.99% of runs. Enterprises must assess and mitigate skill-interface risk before adopting coding agents. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/awsm-research/AgentJailbreak

cs.SE↗

A Survey of Agent Memory in the Second Half: Towards Self-Evolving and Long-Horizon Agents

Research in artificial intelligence is shifting from model innovations and benchmark scores towards problem definition and rigorous real-world evaluation. As the field enters the "second half," the central challenge becomes real utility in long-horizon, dynamic, and user-dependent settings such as agentic coding, deep research, and computer use, where LLM-based agents face context explosion beyond fixed context windows and must continuously accumulate, manage, and selectively reuse information across extended interactions. Memory, with hundreds of papers released in 2025, therefore emerges as the critical solution to fill this utility gap. Beyond passive storage, memory is increasingly the substrate through which agents self-evolve: short-term memory gates which experiences are perceived and abstracted during execution, while long-term memory consolidates them into reusable knowledge and skills, forming the loop through which agents improve from their own experience. In this survey, we provide a unified view of foundation agent memory along three dimensions: memory substrate (internal parametric state and external retrieval-augmented stores), cognitive mechanism (sensory, working, episodic, semantic, and procedural), and memory subject (user-centric personalization and agent-centric experience). We then analyze how memory is operated under single- and multi-agent topologies and highlight learning policies over memory operations, showing how memory management itself is becoming a trainable capability spanning reinforcement-learned context curation, experience consolidation at decision time, and the emerging ecosystem of portable, shareable agent skills. Finally, we review evaluation benchmarks and metrics for memory utility, and outline open challenges and future directions.

cs.CL↗

COMEX: A Composition-Grounded Benchmark and Learning Framework for Explainable Aesthetic Image Cropping

Explainable aesthetic image cropping requires not only localizing a visually pleasing crop but also explaining why it is preferred. Existing crop-and-explain methods largely treat explanation as post-hoc text generation and overlook composition, a key aesthetic factor that links crop decisions with interpretable reasoning. In this paper, we reformulate explainable aesthetic image cropping as a structured crop-composition-explanation problem. To support this setting, we introduce COMEX, a new benchmark built through image expansion and an IO-reversal pipeline. COMEX contains 33,161 quadruples, each consisting of an expanded image, a crop box, a composition category, and a composition-grounded explanation, enabling joint learning of crop localization, composition understanding, and explanation generation. We further propose a two-stage SFT+GRPO framework, where supervised fine-tuning establishes the structured output protocol and basic cropping ability, and GRPO further improves crop quality, composition prediction, and explanation faithfulness. We benchmark 15 large vision-language models and existing cropping methods on COMEX, establishing a comprehensive testbed for composition-grounded explainable aesthetic cropping. Experiments on both COMEX and prior benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and transferability of our framework, with strong performance across evaluation metrics.

cs.CV↗

Long-Horizon Embodied Decision-Making via Multimodal Memory Compression

Agents are increasingly expected to act not only as task executors, but also as decision-makers on behalf of human users. This shift requires agents to accumulate evidence over long horizons, interpret implicit user preferences, and compare multiple candidates under partial observations. In this work, we propose DunphyBench, a new benchmark for evaluating agents on long-horizon human-centered embodied decision-making, where the agent must navigate through multiple embodied housing environments and make decisions that align with multi-dimensional human preferences. Unlike standard embodied reasoning tasks that often focus on procedural planning or immediate goal completion, our setting requires agents to integrate multimodal, multi-source input into coherent knowledge that supports complex reasoning across long horizon. The evaluation results reveal that there is a substantial gap between current agents and human performance. Furthermore, our diagnosis of state-of-the-art VLM-driven agents reveals that memory management is one of the bottlenecks, where raw multimodal history introduces noise that hinders decision quality. Motivated by this finding, we design MeMento, a preference-conditioned multimodal memory compressor that selectively compresses decision-relevant information from long-horizon history based on user preferences with a fixed set of memory tokens. Experiments show that MeMento helps VLM-driven agents improve accuracy by 7.18%, while reducing memory usage by 85.38% compared to the strongest baseline.

cs.CV↗

Orchard: An Open-Source Agentic Modeling Framework

Agentic modeling aims to transform LLMs into autonomous agents capable of solving complex tasks through planning, reasoning, tool use, and multi-turn interaction with external environments. We present Orchard, an open-source framework for scalable agentic modeling. At its core is Orchard Env, a lightweight Kubernetes-native environment service that provides reusable primitives for sandbox lifecycle management across task domains, agent harnesses, and training stages. On top of Orchard Env, we build three agentic modeling recipes. Orchard-SWE targets software engineering agents. We introduce credit-assignment supervised fine-tuning and a progression of RL signals: Balanced Adaptive Rollout (BAR) for sparse-reward optimization, on-policy distillation (OPD) and rubric-based process reward (RPR) for dense supervision, and historical experience distillation, which compresses rollouts from prior experiments into a compact value model for inference-time reranking. Built on the Qwen3.5-35B-A3B backbone, Orchard-SWE reaches 69.7% with RPR-based RL and 73.0% with value-model reranking on SWE-bench Verified, setting a new state of the art among open-source methods while approaching frontier systems over 10x larger. Orchard-GUI trains a 4B vision-language computer-use agent using only 0.4K distilled trajectories and 2.2K open-ended tasks, achieving 68.4% average success across WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and DeepShop, making it the strongest open-source model while remaining competitive with proprietary systems. Orchard-Claw targets personal assistant agents. Trained with only 0.2K synthetic tasks, it achieves 59.6% pass@3 on Claw-Eval and 73.9% when paired with the stronger ZeroClaw harness. Collectively, these results demonstrate that a lightweight, open, harness-agnostic environment layer enables reusable agentic data, training recipes, and evaluation protocols across domains.

cs.AI↗

SkillGate: Cost Efficient Runtime Malicious Skill File Detection in Coding Agents

Software engineering teams now deploy AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) as first-class productivity tools, installing domain-specific skill files to tailor agent behavior to project APIs, framework conventions, and organizational workflows. These complex Markdown files are easily downloaded from public registries with a single npx skills add command and no real security screening, representing a novel supply-chain attack surface: a malicious skill file can silently reprogram agent behavior, exfiltrating credentials, injecting backdoors into generated code, or redirecting agent actions to attacker-controlled endpoints. The threat is not hypothetical: recent reports document hundreds of malicious skill packages in public registries, including organized campaigns that distributed credential-stealing infostealers via fake productivity skills. No systematic toolchain defense exists for this attack surface. We present SkillGate, a deployable security gateway that screens AI skill packages before coding agent installation. SkillGate uses a hybrid regex-prefilter + LLM-judge pipeline: safe-signal files bypass the LLM entirely (skip savings); flagged files have only their matched snippet windows sent to the judge, not the full content (snippet savings). We answer four research questions covering detection effectiveness, screening cost, runtime overhead, and false positive behavior on the SkillsBench benchmark against two existing tools. On SkillsBench (n=1,650, 9.1% malicious), SkillGate achieves F1=0.817, FPR=1.13% while reducing LLM input tokens by 77% vs. full-file screening, and outperforming existing tools by 5-6x on threshold-independent AUPRC (0.830 vs. 0.144/0.162).

cs.SE↗

Evaluating Multi-Turn Multimodal Diagnostic Reasoning on Challenging Real-World Clinical Cases

Clinical diagnostic evaluation should not only assess whether models can provide correct diagnoses, but also reflect the realities of clinical practice, including progressive disclosure of multimodal information, dynamic updating of diagnostic hypotheses, and continuous refinement of clinical reasoning. However, existing evaluations of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) typically rely on single-turn or isolated tasks, making it difficult to fully capture the complexity of real-world clinical diagnosis. To bridge this gap, we developed ClinMM-Bench, the largest multi-turn multimodal clinical diagnostic evaluation benchmark to date. ClinMM-Bench contains 1,089 challenging real-world clinical cases and 3,760 medical images across eight specialties. We systematically evaluated 15 representative MLLMs using a two-level evaluation framework that assessed both diagnostic accuracy and diagnostic reasoning quality. Results showed that proprietary models achieved the highest overall diagnostic accuracy, but the proportion of completely correct diagnoses remained limited across all models. In terms of diagnostic reasoning quality, current models can identify plausible diagnostic directions but still have considerable limitations in generating reliable diagnostic reasoning. Error analysis further identified five representative failure modes: information synthesis failure, knowledge mapping error, perception error, premature closure, and visual hallucination.

cs.CL↗

Structured Scaling of AI Discovery Across Diverse Scientific Domains

Scientific discovery often requires many cycles of proposing, testing, and refining candidate solutions. Language models can increasingly participate in these loops, but simply generating more attempts does not ensure progress: parallel searches may duplicate one another and iterative refinement may become trapped in poor directions. The central challenge is therefore not only to scale AI-driven discovery, but to structure that scaling so that evaluation signals compound over time. Here we introduce SimpleTES (Simple Test-time Evaluation-driven Scaling), a framework that focuses on the structured scaling of AI discovery loops, organizing evaluator queries across independent trajectories, iterative refinement, local candidate selection, and the selective reuse of evaluated histories. Drawing on structural features of scientific communities, SimpleTES uses a single open-source GPT-OSS model to establish new state-of-the-art solutions across 28 open-ended problems in diverse scientific domains ranging from quantum physics and astronomy to biology, AI, and mathematics. These include a 24.5% reduction in quantum circuit compilation overhead, up to 23% lower propulsive cost for deep-space trajectories, a 2.17x faster lasso-path solver, an 8.5% lower-error whole-brain neural-activity predictor, the fastest reported TriMul kernel, and new mathematical constructions beyond prior human or AI records. We further post-train the model for long-horizon discovery by assigning each attempt the final outcome of the trajectory it helped produce. This improves performance on both training and held-out mathematics problems, further advancing the frontier. Together, these results establish structured scaling as a general mechanism for advancing AI scientific discovery.

cs.LG↗

Verify, Repair, Repeat, or Stop? Robust Stopping for Noisy Verify-Repair Loops in LLM Agents

Verify-repair loops are a standard means for large language model (LLM) agents to correct faulty plans in code generation, mathematical reasoning, and tool use. When both the verifier and the repairer are noisy, repair can damage already-correct plans, and reported acceptance keeps rising while true validity falls, so existing methods lack a principled basis for deciding when repair should stop. We propose VRR-Stop, a robust stopping framework for noisy verify-repair-repeat (VRR) loops. A four-parameter noise model separates verifier false acceptance and false rejection from the repair and damage behavior of the repairer. Belief filtering turns repeated verification votes into an estimate of committed validity, and the loop commits or repairs according to the sign of the true marginal gain, which requires only sign identifiability rather than accurate recovery of all parameters. When verifier discrimination approaches zero, calibration itself fails and estimation error can flip the stopping sign, so we pair VRR-Stop with VRR-Guard, an estimation-free fallback that replaces the incumbent candidate only under a sufficient verification margin. On a GSM8K stress setting, VRR-Stop improves final true validity by 60.6 percentage points over fixed five-round repair at an average cost of 0.72 repair rounds. Across settings, stopping reliability is governed jointly by verifier discrimination and the decision margin rather than by the absolute size of estimation error.

cs.AI↗

Mystra: Declarative Dynamic Taint Analysis via Shadow Virtual Machine

Dynamic taint analysis (DTA) for interpreted languages like JavaScript and Python requires three capabilities: observing host-runtime operations, maintaining parallel taint states, and defining how taint propagates. Existing systems couple these capabilities within an instrumentation mechanism -- source-rewriting or engine-native -- either incurring high runtime overhead or demanding engine-specific embeddings. There is yet to be a runtime-independent abstraction of a general DTA that separates taint semantics and state transitions from how a host runtime executes them. We set out to develop a DTA engine that is extensible, performant, and accurate. To achieve this, we introduce a Shadow Virtual Machine executing alongside host runtimes that tracks multi-level taint, provenance, and cross-invocation context. We design Mystra, a declarative taint specification language with formal operational semantics. Mystra is designed to be language model friendly, and is equipped with validators enabling trustworthy automated synthesis of rules. Mystra is also the first to express higher-order function taint transfer declaratively. Further, Mystra rules are compiled ahead of time to a binary representation and dispatch in constant runtime. We implement our vision into a tool named Shar, which contains a shared core engine and instantiations on three runtimes: V8 in both Node$.$js and Chromium (embedding), SpiderMonkey (engine), and CPython (language). Accuracy wise, on SecBench$.$js (493 in-scope CVEs across four CWE categories), our V8 instantiation achieves 95.5% recall with zero false positives on patched-version testing. Regarding performance, the runtime overhead of Shar is 1.85$\times$ over vanilla Node$.$js on NodeMedic's benchmarks, and is 22.7$\times$ lower than NodeMedic-FINE on identical workloads, all the while producing 33.2% higher recall in its supported categories.

cs.PL↗

Mean dimension and rate-distortion function revisited

Around the mean dimensions and rate-distortion functions, using some tools from local entropy theory this paper establishes the following main results: $(1)$ We prove that for non-ergodic measures associated with almost sure processes, the mean Rényi information dimension coincides with the information dimension rate. This answers a question posed by Gutman and Śpiewak (in Around the variational principle for metric mean dimension, \emph{Studia Math.} \textbf{261}(2021) 345-360). $(2)$ We introduce four types of rate-distortion entropies and establish their relation with Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy. $(3)$ We show that for systems with the marker property, if the mean dimension is finite, then the supremum in Lindenstrauss-Tsukamoto's double variational principle can be taken over the set of ergodic measures. Additionally, the double variational principle holds for various other measure-theoretic $ε$-entropies.

math.DS↗

CAPTCHA Solving for Native GUI Agents: Automated Reasoning-Action Data Generation and Self-Corrective Training

GUI agents are rapidly shifting from multi-module pipelines to end-to-end, native vision-language models (VLMs) that perceive raw screenshots and directly interact with digital devices. Despite rapid progress on general GUI tasks, CAPTCHA solving remains a major challenge. On the other hand, although specialized CAPTCHA solving pipelines exist, they cannot handle general GUI tasks. To address this gap, we introduce ReCAP: a CAPTCHA-capable native GUI agent that solves modern, interactive CAPTCHA challenges while retaining general GUI-agent performance. We first develop a dynamic CAPTCHA system spanning seven representative CAPTCHA types, designed to stress primitive and complementary capabilities for CAPTCHA solving. Then, we develop an automated data collection and curation pipeline that generates large-scale CAPTCHA interaction trajectories paired with reasoning traces. As CAPTCHA solving often requires multi-step interaction and recovery from intermediate mistakes, we further leverage failed trajectories to construct self-correction data, training agents to reflect on errors and correct their actions online. Across synthetic and real-world test sets, ReCAP substantially improves CAPTCHA-solving success over its base agents, while maintaining strong performance on general GUI-agent benchmarks.

cs.CR↗

SIMAX: A Scalable and Interpretable Framework for Multi-Fidelity and Annotated Clinician-Patient Dialogue Simulation

Background. The widespread deployment of ambient digital scribes is driving large-scale capture of clinician-patient dialogues. Human coding of clinical communication data remains costly, inconsistent, and difficult to scale, motivating AI-driven communication coding systems. However, evaluating these systems requires real-world dialogues and human-coded labels, both hard to obtain at scale. Methods. We developed SIMAX (Scalable and Interpretable Framework for Multi-Fidelity and Annotated Clinician-Patient Dialogue Simulation), a framework for generating controlled clinical dialogue data with reference behavioral annotations. SIMAX generates clinician-patient dialogues from predefined clinical scenarios, personas and voice conditions, and target communication behaviors. Behaviors are controlled using two codebooks: the Global Codebook for overall communication quality and the WISER Codebook for specific countable behaviors. We evaluated SIMAX using automated and human quality assessments and an example communication coding system. Results. SIMAX generated 3,388 simulated dialogues across three specialties, multiple visit stages, persona characteristics, and accent conditions. Automated assessment showed mean UTMOS and WV-MOS scores of 3.03 and 2.61, WER and CER of 0.07 and 0.05, and CLAP cosine similarity of 0.41, suggesting reasonable speech naturalness, high transcription fidelity, and positive text-audio correspondence. Human evaluation showed a median MOS of 4.67 and a median clinical realism score of 3.00. Downstream evaluation suggests that SIMAX can assess how a communication coding system responds to behavioral targets and reveal insufficient sensitivity in some dimensions. Conclusions. SIMAX generates controlled and reproducible simulated clinician-patient dialogues, providing a data foundation for developing, validating, and refining communication coding systems.

cs.CL↗

DefenseSplat: Enhancing the Robustness of 3D Gaussian Splatting via Frequency-Aware Filtering

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for real-time and high-fidelity 3D reconstruction from posed images. However, recent studies reveal its vulnerability to adversarial corruptions in input views, where imperceptible yet consistent perturbations can drastically degrade rendering quality, increase training and rendering time, and inflate memory usage, even leading to server denial-of-service. In our work, to mitigate this issue, we begin by analyzing the distinct behaviors of adversarial perturbations in the low- and high-frequency components of input images using wavelet transforms. Based on this observation, we design a simple yet effective frequency-aware defense strategy that reconstructs training views by filtering high-frequency noise while preserving low-frequency content. This approach effectively suppresses adversarial artifacts while maintaining the authenticity of the original scene. Notably, it does not significantly impair training on clean data, achieving a desirable trade-off between robustness and performance on clean inputs. Through extensive experiments under a wide range of attack intensities on multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that our method substantially enhances the robustness of 3DGS without access to clean ground-truth supervision. By highlighting and addressing the overlooked vulnerabilities of 3D Gaussian Splatting, our work paves the way for more robust and secure 3D reconstructions.

cs.CV↗

EEG Benchmarking Needs a Task Specification Layer: NeuroDoc for Rulebook-Guided, Executable Benchmark Construction

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models increasingly rely on multi-dataset training and evaluation, yet public EEG datasets still lack a shared task specification layer that can turn heterogeneous recordings into reusable benchmark units. Existing standards organize files, metadata, and provenance, but they do not specify EEG tasks under a common language and rulebook, leaving critical task semantics scattered across papers, code, and manual interpretation. We investigate whether heterogeneous public EEG datasets can be standardized through a structured task specification language paired with a shared rulebook. Our methodology represents each benchmark entry as a task document synchronized with an executable task kernel, with the rulebook defining task fields, evidence requirements, document-kernel alignment, review states, and machine-checkable constraints. Using this methodology, we release a community-reviewed EEG benchmark corpus centered on 53 completed and reviewed entries with 245 task definitions spanning diverse paradigms, and we introduce NeuroDoc and NeuroAudit as the operational support layer for rulebook-guided drafting, upgrading, review, amendment, and release management. We further examine whether the resulting benchmark units can be instantiated in a shared downstream setting across four EEG foundation model backbones, providing execution-based evidence for reusable, auditable, and executable EEG benchmarking infrastructure.

cs.LG↗

Audio Editing in the Era of Foundation Models: A Survey

Audio editing aims to modify a given synthetic or real-world audio signal to satisfy specific user needs. As a promising yet challenging direction in AIGC, it has attracted increasing attention. Recent advances in audio generation have made powerful generative models central to modern audio editing systems. This rapid progress has created a growing need to organize emerging tasks, methods, and resources into a coherent view. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of audio editing in the era of foundation models. We first present a unified taxonomy of existing editing tasks and then summarize the major foundation-model paradigms that support modern audio editing, covering representative approaches from both training-based and training-free perspectives. We further discuss related resources, including datasets, evaluation protocols, and data construction tools. Finally, we identify open challenges in this field and outline promising directions for future research. The project page is released at https://github.com/DaViD-Pigeon/AudioEditSurvey.

eess.AS↗