Zikun Cui

Xuying Ning, Katherine Tieu, Dongqi Fu et al.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in understanding and generating code, from competitive programming to repository-level software engineering. In emerging agentic systems, code is no longer only a target output. It increasingly serves as an operational substrate for agent reasoning, acting, environment modeling, and execution-based verification. We frame this shift through the lens of agent harnesses and introduce code as agent harness: a unified view that centers code as the basis for agent infrastructure. To systematically study this perspective, we organize the survey around three connected layers. First, we study the harness interface, where code connects agents to reasoning, action, and environment modeling. Second, we examine harness mechanisms: planning, memory, and tool use for long-horizon execution, together with feedback-driven control and optimization that make harness reliable and adaptive. Third, we discuss scaling the harness from single-agent systems to multi-agent settings, where shared code artifacts support multi-agent coordination, review, and verification. Across these layers, we summarize representative methods and practical applications of code as agent harness, spanning coding assistants, GUI/OS automation, embodied agents, scientific discovery, personalization and recommendation, DevOps, and enterprise workflows. We further outline open challenges for harness engineering, including evaluation beyond final task success, verification under incomplete feedback, regression-free harness improvement, consistent shared state across multiple agents, human oversight for safety-critical actions, and extensions to multimodal environments. By centering code as the harness of agentic AI, this survey provides a unified roadmap toward executable, verifiable, and stateful AI agent systems.

Tianyi Huang, Zikun Cui, Cuiqianhe Du et al.

Misleading text detection on social media platforms is a critical research area, as these texts can lead to public misunderstanding, social panic and even economic losses. This paper proposes a novel framework - CL-ISR (Contrastive Learning and Implicit Stance Reasoning), which combines contrastive learning and implicit stance reasoning, to improve the detection accuracy of misleading texts on social media. First, we use the contrastive learning algorithm to improve the model's learning ability of semantic differences between truthful and misleading texts. Contrastive learning could help the model to better capture the distinguishing features between different categories by constructing positive and negative sample pairs. This approach enables the model to capture distinguishing features more effectively, particularly in linguistically complicated situations. Second, we introduce the implicit stance reasoning module, to explore the potential stance tendencies in the text and their relationships with related topics. This method is effective for identifying content that misleads through stance shifting or emotional manipulation, because it can capture the implicit information behind the text. Finally, we integrate these two algorithms together to form a new framework, CL-ISR, which leverages the discriminative power of contrastive learning and the interpretive depth of stance reasoning to significantly improve detection effect.

Zikun Cui, Tianyi Huang, Chia-En Chiang et al.

With the proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs), the detection of misinformation has become increasingly important and complex. This research proposes an innovative verifiable misinformation detection LLM agent that goes beyond traditional true/false binary judgments. The agent actively verifies claims through dynamic interaction with diverse web sources, assesses information source credibility, synthesizes evidence, and provides a complete verifiable reasoning process. Our designed agent architecture includes three core tools: precise web search tool, source credibility assessment tool and numerical claim verification tool. These tools enable the agent to execute multi-step verification strategies, maintain evidence logs, and form comprehensive assessment conclusions. We evaluate using standard misinformation datasets such as FakeNewsNet, comparing with traditional machine learning models and LLMs. Evaluation metrics include standard classification metrics, quality assessment of reasoning processes, and robustness testing against rewritten content. Experimental results show that our agent outperforms baseline methods in misinformation detection accuracy, reasoning transparency, and resistance to information rewriting, providing a new paradigm for trustworthy AI-assisted fact-checking.

Cuiqianhe Du, Chia-En Chiang, Tianyi Huang et al.

This paper focuses on the detection of potentially dangerous tendencies of social media users in an innovative multimodal way. We integrate Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) together. Firstly, we apply NLP on the user-generated text and conduct semantic analysis, sentiment recognition and keyword extraction to get subtle risk signals from social media posts. Meanwhile, we build a heterogeneous user relationship graph based on social interaction and propose a novel relational graph convolutional network to model user relationship, attention relationship and content dissemination path to discover some important structural information and user behaviors. Finally, we combine textual features extracted from these two models above with graph structural information, which provides a more robust and effective way to discover at-risk users. Our experiments on real social media datasets from different platforms show that our model can achieve significant improvement over single-modality methods.