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Yurun Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Yurun Chen.

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Towards the Harness of Embodied Agents

The success of coding agents has established the harness as a paradigm: what an agent achieves depends not on the model alone, but on the infrastructure around it. We ask whether the same paradigm extends to embodied agents in the physical world. We present Thea, a harness in which an agentic loop orchestrates robot capabilities, each wrapped as a callable tool. It inherits the core components of coding agents, modified as the physical world requires. The world, however, withholds two abilities that software grants for free: reading the state of the world, and judging the outcome of an action. To bridge these gaps, Thea introduces Scene Graph as Context, a persistent, symbolic representation of the world, and Evaluation as Exit Codes, which detects when an action should terminate, judges whether it succeeded, and on failure diagnoses the cause. Together they close the loop between the agent and the physical world. Rich behaviors then emerge from the composition of tools, and the closed loop carries long-horizon tasks to completion in real environments.

cs.AI

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.

cs.RO

SkillHarness: Harnessing Safe Skills for Computer-Use Agents

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are increasingly deployed in dynamic interactive environments, creating a growing need for continual skill learning during interaction. Recent approaches address this challenge by learning reusable skills from successful trajectories. However, these skill learning methods largely assume static and safe environments, overlooking risks from adversarial interactions (e.g., prompt injections) and environmental dynamics (e.g., pop-ups). In dynamic settings, such assumptions can lead to risky skill learning and brittle execution, undermining the reliability of CUAs. This raises the question: how can CUAs learn and use skills safely in dynamic environments? To address this problem, we propose SkillHarness, a framework for safe skill harnessing in dynamic environments. SkillHarness moves beyond static skill abstractions by modeling skill learning and utilization as a safety-constrained interaction process. Specifically, we introduce the skill boundary that leverages multi-source supervision signals to identify safe skills from interaction trajectories, and construct self-improving safety constraints throughout the skill lifecycle. In addition, SkillHarness introduces selective skill reuse, where tasks are guided to decompose according to context and completed through the selective activation of skill subsets. Our experiments demonstrate that SkillHarness significantly reduces the unsafe rate of learned skills by 57.1% and consistently improves execution stability under dynamic environmental changes, outperforming existing baselines.

cs.AI

SafePred: A Predictive Guardrail for Computer-Using Agents via World Models

With the widespread deployment of Computer-using Agents (CUAs) in complex real-world environments, prevalent long-term risks often lead to severe and irreversible consequences. Most existing guardrails for CUAs adopt a reactive approach, constraining agent behavior only within the current observation space. While these guardrails can prevent immediate short-term risks (e.g., clicking on a phishing link), they cannot proactively avoid long-term risks: seemingly reasonable actions can lead to high-risk consequences that emerge with a delay (e.g., cleaning logs leads to future audits being untraceable), which reactive guardrails cannot identify within the current observation space. To address these limitations, we propose a predictive guardrail approach, with the core idea of aligning predicted future risks with current decisions. Based on this approach, we present SafePred, a predictive guardrail framework for CUAs that establishes a risk-to-decision loop to ensure safe agent behavior. SafePred supports two key abilities: (1) Short- and long-term risk prediction: by using safety policies as the basis for risk prediction, SafePred leverages the prediction capability of the world model to generate semantic representations of both short-term and long-term risks, thereby identifying and pruning actions that lead to high-risk states; (2) Decision optimization: translating predicted risks into actionable safe decision guidances through step-level interventions and task-level re-planning. Extensive experiments show that SafePred significantly reduces high-risk behaviors, achieving over 97.6% safety performance and improving task utility by up to 21.4% compared with reactive baselines.

cs.CL

Graph2Eval: Automatic Multimodal Task Generation for Agents via Knowledge Graphs

As multimodal LLM-driven agents advance in autonomy and generalization, traditional static datasets face inherent scalability limitations and are insufficient for fully assessing their capabilities in increasingly complex and diverse tasks. Existing studies have attempted to generate agent tasks using LLMs, but due to the inherent hallucinations of LLMs and the lack of internal data relationship modeling, these tasks often exhibit semantic inconsistencies and solvability issues. To address these challenges, we introduce Graph2Eval, a knowledge-graph-driven framework for automated, scalable, and semantically grounded agent task generation. At its core, Graph2Eval leverages a knowledge graph built from heterogeneous external data sources as a structured task space, generating multimodal agent tasks through subgraph sampling and task construction guided by task templates and meta-path strategies. To further ensure task reliability, a multi-stage filtering pipeline based on node reachability analysis, LLM scoring, and similarity analysis ensures the diversity and solvability of the generated tasks. By unifying both RAG Agent and Web Agent scenarios, Graph2Eval enables efficient generation of multimodal document understanding tasks and multi-step web interaction tasks. We instantiate the framework with Graph2Eval-Bench, a curated dataset of 1,319 tasks spanning document understanding and web interaction scenarios. Extensive experiments show that, on average, Graph2Eval improves task semantic consistency by 20% and solvability by 17% over baselines, while Graph2Eval-Bench effectively distinguishes agent performance, offering a new perspective on agent evaluation.

cs.CL

GUI-PRA: Process Reward Agent for GUI Tasks

Long-horizon GUI automation remains challenging due to error accumulation over extended interaction sequences. Process Reward Models (PRMs) provide dense step-level supervision for mitigating error accumulation, yet standard PRMs are poorly suited to GUI verification. Standard PRM judgments often rely on superficial visual alignment rather than functional correctness, reflecting an evaluative knowledge gap caused by missing domain-specific adjudication logic. Standard PRMs also perform passive, single-pass visual assessment, which creates Visual Ambiguity when reliable judgment requires actively locating, parsing, or inspecting task-relevant UI evidence. We introduce GUI-PRA, a Process Reward Agent that transforms GUI process evaluation from passive scoring into active investigation. GUI-PRA couples Experience-Injected Criterion Synthesis, which distills generalized verification principles into state-specific criteria, with Criterion-Guided Autoregressive Perception, which uses these criteria to navigate multi-granularity visual tools and gather grounded evidence. On AndroidWorld and Mobile-MiniWoB++, GUI-PRA achieves improvements of 5.0% and 6.5% over standard PRMs on the Qwen-VL series, with Qwen3-VL attaining 54.74% success rate on AndroidWorld. On the offline OS-Critic Bench, GUI-PRA demonstrates strong competitiveness against fully trained critic models.

cs.AI

HarmonyGuard: Toward Safety and Utility in Web Agents via Adaptive Policy Enhancement and Dual-Objective Optimization

Large language models enable agents to autonomously perform tasks in open web environments. However, as hidden threats within the web evolve, web agents face the challenge of balancing task performance with emerging risks during long-sequence operations. Although this challenge is critical, current research remains limited to single-objective optimization or single-turn scenarios, lacking the capability for collaborative optimization of both safety and utility in web environments. To address this gap, we propose HarmonyGuard, a multi-agent collaborative framework that leverages policy enhancement and objective optimization to jointly improve both utility and safety. HarmonyGuard features a multi-agent architecture characterized by two fundamental capabilities: (1) Adaptive Policy Enhancement: We introduce the Policy Agent within HarmonyGuard, which automatically extracts and maintains structured security policies from unstructured external documents, while continuously updating policies in response to evolving threats. (2) Dual-Objective Optimization: Based on the dual objectives of safety and utility, the Utility Agent integrated within HarmonyGuard performs the Markovian real-time reasoning to evaluate the objectives and utilizes metacognitive capabilities for their optimization. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks show that HarmonyGuard improves policy compliance by up to 38% and task completion by up to 20% over existing baselines, while achieving over 90% policy compliance across all tasks. Our project is available here: https://github.com/YurunChen/HarmonyGuard.

cs.CL

OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for General Computing Devices Use

The dream to create AI assistants as capable and versatile as the fictional J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man has long captivated imaginations. With the evolution of (multi-modal) large language models ((M)LLMs), this dream is closer to reality, as (M)LLM-based Agents using computing devices (e.g., computers and mobile phones) by operating within the environments and interfaces (e.g., Graphical User Interface (GUI)) provided by operating systems (OS) to automate tasks have significantly advanced. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these advanced agents, designated as OS Agents. We begin by elucidating the fundamentals of OS Agents, exploring their key components including the environment, observation space, and action space, and outlining essential capabilities such as understanding, planning, and grounding. We then examine methodologies for constructing OS Agents, focusing on domain-specific foundation models and agent frameworks. A detailed review of evaluation protocols and benchmarks highlights how OS Agents are assessed across diverse tasks. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify promising directions for future research, including safety and privacy, personalization and self-evolution. This survey aims to consolidate the state of OS Agents research, providing insights to guide both academic inquiry and industrial development. An open-source GitHub repository is maintained as a dynamic resource to foster further innovation in this field. We present a 9-page version of our work, accepted by ACL 2025, to provide a concise overview to the domain.

cs.AI

TRiMM: Transformer-Based Rich Motion Matching for Real-Time multi-modal Interaction in Digital Humans

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven digital humans have sparked a series of recent studies on co-speech gesture generation systems. However, existing approaches struggle with real-time synthesis and long-text comprehension. This paper introduces Transformer-Based Rich Motion Matching (TRiMM), a novel multi-modal framework for real-time 3D gesture generation. Our method incorporates three modules: 1) a cross-modal attention mechanism to achieve precise temporal alignment between speech and gestures; 2) a long-context autoregressive model with a sliding window mechanism for effective sequence modeling; 3) a large-scale gesture matching system that constructs an atomic action library and enables real-time retrieval. Additionally, we develop a lightweight pipeline implemented in the Unreal Engine for experimentation. Our approach achieves real-time inference at 120 fps and maintains a per-sentence latency of 0.15 seconds on consumer-grade GPUs (Geforce RTX3060). Extensive subjective and objective evaluations on the ZEGGS, and BEAT datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. TRiMM enhances the speed of co-speech gesture generation while ensuring gesture quality, enabling LLM-driven digital humans to respond to speech in real time and synthesize corresponding gestures. Our code is available at https://github.com/teroon/TRiMM-Transformer-Based-Rich-Motion-Matching

cs.GR

EcoAgent: An Efficient Device-Cloud Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Mobile Automation

To tackle increasingly complex tasks, recent research on mobile agents has shifted towards multi-agent collaboration. Current mobile multi-agent systems are primarily deployed in the cloud, leading to high latency and operational costs. A straightforward idea is to deploy a device-cloud collaborative multi-agent system, which is nontrivial, as directly extending existing systems introduces new challenges: (1) reliance on cloud-side verification requires uploading mobile screenshots, compromising user privacy; and (2) open-loop cooperation lacking device-to-cloud feedback, underutilizing device resources and increasing latency. To overcome these limitations, we propose EcoAgent, a closed-loop device-cloud collaborative multi-agent framework designed for privacy-aware, efficient, and responsive mobile automation. EcoAgent integrates a novel reasoning approach, Dual-ReACT, into the cloud-based Planning Agent, fully exploiting cloud reasoning to compensate for limited on-device capacity, thereby enabling device-side verification and lightweight feedback. Furthermore, the device-based Observation Agent leverages a Pre-understanding Module to summarize screen content into concise textual descriptions, significantly reducing token usage and device-cloud communication overhead while preserving privacy. Experiments on AndroidWorld demonstrate that EcoAgent matches the task success rates of fully cloud-based agents, while reducing resource consumption and response latency. Our project is available here: https://github.com/Yi-Biao/EcoAgent.

cs.AI

ARMO: Autoregressive Rigging for Multi-Category Objects

Recent advancements in large-scale generative models have significantly improved the quality and diversity of 3D shape generation. However, most existing methods focus primarily on generating static 3D models, overlooking the potentially dynamic nature of certain shapes, such as humanoids, animals, and insects. To address this gap, we focus on rigging, a fundamental task in animation that establishes skeletal structures and skinning for 3D models. In this paper, we introduce OmniRig, the first large-scale rigging dataset, comprising 79,499 meshes with detailed skeleton and skinning information. Unlike traditional benchmarks that rely on predefined standard poses (e.g., A-pose, T-pose), our dataset embraces diverse shape categories, styles, and poses. Leveraging this rich dataset, we propose ARMO, a novel rigging framework that utilizes an autoregressive model to predict both joint positions and connectivity relationships in a unified manner. By treating the skeletal structure as a complete graph and discretizing it into tokens, we encode the joints using an auto-encoder to obtain a latent embedding and an autoregressive model to predict the tokens. A mesh-conditioned latent diffusion model is used to predict the latent embedding for conditional skeleton generation. Our method addresses the limitations of regression-based approaches, which often suffer from error accumulation and suboptimal connectivity estimation. Through extensive experiments on the OmniRig dataset, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in skeleton prediction, demonstrating improved generalization across diverse object categories. The code and dataset will be made public for academic use upon acceptance.

cs.CV

Evaluating the Robustness of Multimodal Agents Against Active Environmental Injection Attacks

As researchers continue to optimize AI agents for more effective task execution within operating systems, they often overlook a critical security concern: the ability of these agents to detect "impostors" within their environment. Through an analysis of the agents' operational context, we identify a significant threat-attackers can disguise malicious attacks as environmental elements, injecting active disturbances into the agents' execution processes to manipulate their decision-making. We define this novel threat as the Active Environment Injection Attack (AEIA). Focusing on the interaction mechanisms of the Android OS, we conduct a risk assessment of AEIA and identify two critical security vulnerabilities: (1) Adversarial content injection in multimodal interaction interfaces, where attackers embed adversarial instructions within environmental elements to mislead agent decision-making; and (2) Reasoning gap vulnerabilities in the agent's task execution process, which increase susceptibility to AEIA attacks during reasoning. To evaluate the impact of these vulnerabilities, we propose AEIA-MN, an attack scheme that exploits interaction vulnerabilities in mobile operating systems to assess the robustness of MLLM-based agents. Experimental results show that even advanced MLLMs are highly vulnerable to this attack, achieving a maximum attack success rate of 93% on the AndroidWorld benchmark by combining two vulnerabilities.

cs.CL

DRiVE: Diffusion-based Rigging Empowers Generation of Versatile and Expressive Characters

Recent advances in generative models have enabled high-quality 3D character reconstruction from multi-modal. However, animating these generated characters remains a challenging task, especially for complex elements like garments and hair, due to the lack of large-scale datasets and effective rigging methods. To address this gap, we curate AnimeRig, a large-scale dataset with detailed skeleton and skinning annotations. Building upon this, we propose DRiVE, a novel framework for generating and rigging 3D human characters with intricate structures. Unlike existing methods, DRiVE utilizes a 3D Gaussian representation, facilitating efficient animation and high-quality rendering. We further introduce GSDiff, a 3D Gaussian-based diffusion module that predicts joint positions as spatial distributions, overcoming the limitations of regression-based approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DRiVE achieves precise rigging results, enabling realistic dynamics for clothing and hair, and surpassing previous methods in both quality and versatility. The code and dataset will be made public for academic use upon acceptance.

cs.CV

SRIF: Semantic Shape Registration Empowered by Diffusion-based Image Morphing and Flow Estimation

In this paper, we propose SRIF, a novel Semantic shape Registration framework based on diffusion-based Image morphing and Flow estimation. More concretely, given a pair of extrinsically aligned shapes, we first render them from multi-views, and then utilize an image interpolation framework based on diffusion models to generate sequences of intermediate images between them. The images are later fed into a dynamic 3D Gaussian splatting framework, with which we reconstruct and post-process for intermediate point clouds respecting the image morphing processing. In the end, tailored for the above, we propose a novel registration module to estimate continuous normalizing flow, which deforms source shape consistently towards the target, with intermediate point clouds as weak guidance. Our key insight is to leverage large vision models (LVMs) to associate shapes and therefore obtain much richer semantic information on the relationship between shapes than the ad-hoc feature extraction and alignment. As a consequence, SRIF achieves high-quality dense correspondences on challenging shape pairs, but also delivers smooth, semantically meaningful interpolation in between. Empirical evidence justifies the effectiveness and superiority of our method as well as specific design choices. The code is released at https://github.com/rqhuang88/SRIF.

cs.CV