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Zongyue Li

Publications and source records attributed to Zongyue Li.

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Last Step Matters: Early Uncertainty Cannot Predict Failure in Long-Horizon Agents

Early failure prediction is important for long-horizon agents, as it enables timely intervention and can reduce inference and tool-use costs. Uncertainty quantification, such as verbal confidence and perplexity, offers a promising approach to detecting agent failures; however, it has not been explored whether these signals retain their discriminative power during the intermediate stages of long-horizon execution. We evaluate mainstream uncertainty signals on deep-research tasks and find that verbal confidence reliably distinguishes failures at trajectory completion, achieving a mean AUROC of 0.85, whereas all evaluated signals offer limited predictive value earlier in execution, with none exceeding a mean AUROC of 0.60 at 50% trajectory progress. We identify an underlying mechanism explaining this gap: path switching, where agents frequently abandon their current search direction in-trajectory, breaking the link between early signal and final outcome. These findings challenge the assumption that intermediate uncertainty can reliably guide early intervention. They also motivate a practical recommendation for agent harnesses in deep-research settings: use final-step confidence to decide whether to restart, an approach that our experiments find more effective than in-trajectory intervention.

cs.LG

DAWM: Diffusion Action World Models for Offline Reinforcement Learning via Action-Inferred Transitions

Diffusion-based world models have demonstrated strong capabilities in synthesizing realistic long-horizon trajectories for offline reinforcement learning (RL). However, many existing methods do not directly generate actions alongside states and rewards, limiting their compatibility with standard value-based offline RL algorithms that rely on one-step temporal difference (TD) learning. While prior work has explored joint modeling of states, rewards, and actions to address this issue, such formulations often lead to increased training complexity and reduced performance in practice. We propose \textbf{DAWM}, a diffusion-based world model that generates future state-reward trajectories conditioned on the current state, action, and return-to-go, paired with an inverse dynamics model (IDM) for efficient action inference. This modular design produces complete synthetic transitions suitable for one-step TD-based offline RL, enabling effective and computationally efficient training. Empirically, we show that conservative offline RL algorithms such as TD3BC and IQL benefit significantly from training on these augmented trajectories, consistently outperforming prior diffusion-based baselines across multiple tasks in the D4RL benchmark.

cs.LG

MedOpenClaw and MedFlowBench: Auditing Medical Agents in Full-Study Workflows

Medical imaging benchmarks often evaluate VLMs on pre-selected 2D images, slices, crops, or patches, making evaluation closer to visual recognition. Real clinical workflows impose a different burden: readers must search through complete studies, operate imaging software, navigate across slices and magnifications, and document visual evidence that can be audited. We argue that this evidence-producing workflow is a critical missing evaluation axis for medical imaging agents. To study it, we introduce MedFlowBench, a full-study benchmark for VLM agents, together with MedOpenClaw, a controlled and replayable runtime in which agents operate medical imaging viewers such as 3D Slicer and QuPath. In each episode, an agent inspects a complete radiology study or whole-slide pathology image, returns a task answer, and submits structured evidence, including key slices, coordinates, regions of interest, or lesion-state fields. This evidence is automatically checked against withheld masks, annotations, and labels. Across evaluated models, final answer-only scoring gives an overly optimistic picture: when answers must also be supported by correct evidence, performance drops substantially on complex workflows. We further find that adding image-analysis tools does not by itself solve the problem. Tools help when they make a complex procedure simple and reliable, but agents still struggle when they must choose inputs, manage viewer state, and verify intermediate outputs over multiple steps. MedFlowBench exposes whether medical imaging agents can produce auditable evidence from complete studies, rather than plausible answers from selected images.

cs.CV

AWorld: Orchestrating the Training Recipe for Agentic AI

The learning from practice paradigm is crucial for developing capable Agentic AI systems, yet it is severely hampered by inefficient experience generation, a bottleneck especially pronounced in complex benchmarks like GAIA. To address this, we introduce AWorld, an open-source system engineered for large-scale agent-environment interaction. By distributing tasks across a cluster, AWorld accelerates experience collection by 14.6x compared to standard single-node, sequential execution. This critical speedup makes extensive reinforcement learning practical and scalable. Leveraging this capability, we trained a Qwen3-32B-based agent that achieves pass@1 accuracy of 32.23% on the GAIA test set, which surpasses GPT-4o (27.91%) and rivals DeepSeek-V3 (31.89%). Our open-source system and the resulting agent provide a practical blueprint for a complete agentic AI training pipeline, from efficient interaction to demonstrable model improvement.

cs.AI

Autoregressive Policy Optimization for Constrained Allocation Tasks

Allocation tasks represent a class of problems where a limited amount of resources must be allocated to a set of entities at each time step. Prominent examples of this task include portfolio optimization or distributing computational workloads across servers. Allocation tasks are typically bound by linear constraints describing practical requirements that have to be strictly fulfilled at all times. In portfolio optimization, for example, investors may be obligated to allocate less than 30\% of the funds into a certain industrial sector in any investment period. Such constraints restrict the action space of allowed allocations in intricate ways, which makes learning a policy that avoids constraint violations difficult. In this paper, we propose a new method for constrained allocation tasks based on an autoregressive process to sequentially sample allocations for each entity. In addition, we introduce a novel de-biasing mechanism to counter the initial bias caused by sequential sampling. We demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to a variety of Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) methods on three distinct constrained allocation tasks: portfolio optimization, computational workload distribution, and a synthetic allocation benchmark. Our code is available at: https://github.com/niklasdbs/paspo

cs.AI

ForecastTKGQuestions: A Benchmark for Temporal Question Answering and Forecasting over Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Question answering over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGQA) has recently found increasing interest. TKGQA requires temporal reasoning techniques to extract the relevant information from temporal knowledge bases. The only existing TKGQA dataset, i.e., CronQuestions, consists of temporal questions based on the facts from a fixed time period, where a temporal knowledge graph (TKG) spanning the same period can be fully used for answer inference, allowing the TKGQA models to use even the future knowledge to answer the questions based on the past facts. In real-world scenarios, however, it is also common that given the knowledge until now, we wish the TKGQA systems to answer the questions asking about the future. As humans constantly seek plans for the future, building TKGQA systems for answering such forecasting questions is important. Nevertheless, this has still been unexplored in previous research. In this paper, we propose a novel task: forecasting question answering over temporal knowledge graphs. We also propose a large-scale TKGQA benchmark dataset, i.e., ForecastTKGQuestions, for this task. It includes three types of questions, i.e., entity prediction, yes-no, and fact reasoning questions. For every forecasting question in our dataset, QA models can only have access to the TKG information before the timestamp annotated in the given question for answer inference. We find that the state-of-the-art TKGQA methods perform poorly on forecasting questions, and they are unable to answer yes-no questions and fact reasoning questions. To this end, we propose ForecastTKGQA, a TKGQA model that employs a TKG forecasting module for future inference, to answer all three types of questions. Experimental results show that ForecastTKGQA outperforms recent TKGQA methods on the entity prediction questions, and it also shows great effectiveness in answering the other two types of questions.

cs.AI

Improving Few-Shot Inductive Learning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs using Confidence-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

Temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC) aims to predict the missing links among the entities in a temporal knwoledge graph (TKG). Most previous TKGC methods only consider predicting the missing links among the entities seen in the training set, while they are unable to achieve great performance in link prediction concerning newly-emerged unseen entities. Recently, a new task, i.e., TKG few-shot out-of-graph (OOG) link prediction, is proposed, where TKGC models are required to achieve great link prediction performance concerning newly-emerged entities that only have few-shot observed examples. In this work, we propose a TKGC method FITCARL that combines few-shot learning with reinforcement learning to solve this task. In FITCARL, an agent traverses through the whole TKG to search for the prediction answer. A policy network is designed to guide the search process based on the traversed path. To better address the data scarcity problem in the few-shot setting, we introduce a module that computes the confidence of each candidate action and integrate it into the policy for action selection. We also exploit the entity concept information with a novel concept regularizer to boost model performance. Experimental results show that FITCARL achieves stat-of-the-art performance on TKG few-shot OOG link prediction.

cs.LG