Abstract:Traditional recommendation systems represent users and items as dense vectors and learn to align them in a shared latent space for relevance estimation. Recent LLM-based recommenders instead leverage natural-language representations that are easier to interpret and integrate with downstream reasoning modules. This paper studies how to construct effective textual profiles for users and items, and how to align them for recommendation. A central difficulty is that the best profile format is not known a priori: manually designed templates can be brittle and misaligned with task objectives. Moreover, generating user and item profiles independently may produce descriptions that are individually plausible yet semantically inconsistent for a specific user--item pair. We propose Duet, an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. Duet follows a three-stage procedure: it first turns raw histories and metadata into compact cues, then expands these cues into paired profile prompts and then generate profiles, and finally optimizes the generation policy with reinforcement learning using downstream recommendation performance as feedback. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that Duet consistently outperforms strong baselines, demonstrating the benefits of template-free profile exploration and joint user-item textual alignment.
Abstract:World models have been emerging as critical components for assessing the consequences of actions generated by interactive agents in online planning and offline evaluation. In text-based environments, world models are typically evaluated and trained with single-step metrics such as Exact Match, aiming to improve the similarity between predicted and real-world states, but such metrics have been shown to be insufficient for capturing actual agent behavior. To address this issue, we introduce a new behavior-aligned training paradigm aimed at improving the functional consistency between the world model and the real environment. This paradigm focuses on optimizing a tractable step-level metric named Behavior Consistency Reward (BehR), which measures how much the likelihood of a logged next action changes between the real state and the world-model-predicted state under a frozen Reference Agent. Experiments on WebShop and TextWorld show that BehR-based training improves long-term alignment in several settings, with the clearest gains in WebShop and less movement in near-ceiling regimes, while preserving or improving single-step prediction quality in three of four settings. World models trained with BehR also achieve lower false positives in offline surrogate evaluation and show modest but encouraging gains in inference-time lookahead planning.
Abstract:Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in completing complex browser tasks, yet they still struggle with long-horizon workflows. A key bottleneck is the grounding gap in existing skill formulations: textual workflow skills provide natural language guidance but cannot be directly executed, while code-based skills are executable but opaque to the agent, offering no step-level understanding for error recovery or adaptation. We introduce WebXSkill, a framework that bridges this gap with executable skills, each pairing a parameterized action program with step-level natural language guidance, enabling both direct execution and agent-driven adaptation. WebXSkill operates in three stages: skill extraction mines reusable action subsequences from readily available synthetic agent trajectories and abstracts them into parameterized skills, skill organization indexes skills into a URL-based graph for context-aware retrieval, and skill deployment exposes two complementary modes, grounded mode for fully automated multi-step execution and guided mode where skills serve as step-by-step instructions that the agent follows with its native planning. On WebArena and WebVoyager, WebXSkill improves task success rate by up to 9.8 and 12.9 points over the baseline, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of executable skills for web agents. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/WebXSkill.
Abstract:Recent advances in language model (LM) agents have significantly improved automated software engineering (SWE). Prior work has proposed various agentic workflows and training strategies as well as analyzed failure modes of agentic systems on SWE tasks, focusing on several contextual information signals: Reproduction Test, Regression Test, Edit Location, Execution Context, and API Usage. However, the individual contribution of each signal to overall success remains underexplored, particularly their ideal contribution when intermediate information is perfectly obtained. To address this gap, we introduce Oracle-SWE, a unified method to isolate and extract oracle information signals from SWE benchmarks and quantify the impact of each signal on agent performance. To further validate the pattern, we evaluate the performance gain of signals extracted by strong LMs when provided to a base agent, approximating real-world task-resolution settings. These evaluations aim to guide research prioritization for autonomous coding systems.
Abstract:This work characterizes large language models' chain-of-thought generation as a structured trajectory through representation space. We show that mathematical reasoning traverses functionally ordered, step-specific subspaces that become increasingly separable with layer depth. This structure already exists in base models, while reasoning training primarily accelerates convergence toward termination-related subspaces rather than introducing new representational organization. While early reasoning steps follow similar trajectories, correct and incorrect solutions diverge systematically at late stages. This late-stage divergence enables mid-reasoning prediction of final-answer correctness with ROC-AUC up to 0.87. Furthermore, we introduce trajectory-based steering, an inference-time intervention framework that enables reasoning correction and length control based on derived ideal trajectories. Together, these results establish reasoning trajectories as a geometric lens for interpreting, predicting, and controlling LLM reasoning behavior.
Abstract:Speech-driven large language models (LLMs) are increasingly accessed through speech interfaces, introducing new security risks via open acoustic channels. We present Sirens' Whisper (SWhisper), the first practical framework for covert prompt-based attacks against speech-driven LLMs under realistic black-box conditions using commodity hardware. SWhisper enables robust, inaudible delivery of arbitrary target baseband audio-including long and structured prompts-on commodity devices by encoding it into near-ultrasound waveforms that demodulate faithfully after acoustic transmission and microphone nonlinearity. This is achieved through a simple yet effective approach to modeling nonlinear channel characteristics across devices and environments, combined with lightweight channel-inversion pre-compensation. Building on this high-fidelity covert channel, we design a voice-aware jailbreak generation method that ensures intelligibility, brevity, and transferability under speech-driven interfaces. Experiments across both commercial and open-source speech-driven LLMs demonstrate strong black-box effectiveness. On commercial models, SWhisper achieves up to 0.94 non-refusal (NR) and 0.925 specific-convincing (SC). A controlled user study further shows that the injected jailbreak audio is perceptually indistinguishable from background-only playback for human listeners. Although jailbreaks serve as a case study, the underlying covert acoustic channel enables a broader class of high-fidelity prompt-injection and commandexecution attacks.
Abstract:Building software repositories typically requires significant manual effort. Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents have accelerated automation in software engineering (SWE). We introduce RepoLaunch, the first agent capable of automatically resolving dependencies, compiling source code, and extracting test results for repositories across arbitrary programming languages and operating systems. To demonstrate its utility, we further propose a fully automated pipeline for SWE dataset creation, where task design is the only human intervention. RepoLaunch automates the remaining steps, enabling scalable benchmarking and training of coding agents and LLMs. Notably, several works on agentic benchmarking and training have recently adopted RepoLaunch for automated task generation.
Abstract:Supervised causal learning has shown promise in causal discovery, yet it often struggles with generalization across diverse interventional settings, particularly when intervention targets are unknown. To address this, we propose TICL (Test-time Interventional Causal Learning), a novel method that synergizes Test-Time Training with Joint Causal Inference. Specifically, we design a self-augmentation strategy to generate instance-specific training data at test time, effectively avoiding distribution shifts. Furthermore, by integrating joint causal inference, we developed a PC-inspired two-phase supervised learning scheme, which effectively leverages self-augmented training data while ensuring theoretical identifiability. Extensive experiments on bnlearn benchmarks demonstrate TICL's superiority in multiple aspects of causal discovery and intervention target detection.
Abstract:Open-Ended Deep Research (OEDR) pushes LLM agents beyond short-form QA toward long-horizon workflows that iteratively search, connect, and synthesize evidence into structured reports. However, existing OEDR agents largely follow either linear ``search-then-generate'' accumulation or outline-centric planning. The former suffers from lost-in-the-middle failures as evidence grows, while the latter relies on the LLM to implicitly infer knowledge gaps from the outline alone, providing weak supervision for identifying missing relations and triggering targeted exploration. We present DualGraph memory, an architecture that separates what the agent knows from how it writes. DualGraph maintains two co-evolving graphs: an Outline Graph (OG), and a Knowledge Graph (KG), a semantic memory that stores fine-grained knowledge units, including core entities, concepts, and their relations. By analyzing the KG topology together with structural signals from the OG, DualGraph generates targeted search queries, enabling more efficient and comprehensive iterative knowledge-driven exploration and refinement. Across DeepResearch Bench, DeepResearchGym, and DeepConsult, DualGraph consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in report depth, breadth, and factual grounding; for example, it reaches a 53.08 RACE score on DeepResearch Bench with GPT-5. Moreover, ablation studies confirm the central role of the dual-graph design.
Abstract:We introduce GUI-360$^\circ$, a large-scale, comprehensive dataset and benchmark suite designed to advance computer-using agents (CUAs). CUAs present unique challenges and is constrained by three persistent gaps: a scarcity of real-world CUA tasks, the lack of automated collection-and-annotation pipelines for multi-modal trajectories, and the absence of a unified benchmark that jointly evaluates GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction. GUI-360$^\circ$ addresses these gaps with an LLM-augmented, largely automated pipeline for query sourcing, environment-template construction, task instantiation, batched execution, and LLM-driven quality filtering. The released corpus contains over 1.2M executed action steps across thousands of trajectories in popular Windows office applications, and includes full-resolution screenshots, accessibility metadata when available, instantiated goals, intermediate reasoning traces, and both successful and failed action trajectories. The dataset supports three canonical tasks, GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction, and a hybrid GUI+API action space that reflects modern agent designs. Benchmarking state-of-the-art vision--language models on GUI-360$^\circ$ reveals substantial out-of-the-box shortcomings in grounding and action prediction; supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield significant gains but do not close the gap to human-level reliability. We release GUI-360$^\circ$ and accompanying code to facilitate reproducible research and accelerate progress on robust desktop CUAs. The full dataset has been made public on https://huggingface.co/datasets/vyokky/GUI-360.