Zaitang Li

Yuxuan Wan, Tianqing Fang, Zaitang Li et al.

Recent advances in Deep Research Agents (DRAs) are transforming automated knowledge discovery and problem-solving. While the majority of existing efforts focus on enhancing policy capabilities via post-training, we propose an alternative paradigm: self-evolving the agent's ability by iteratively verifying the policy model's outputs, guided by meticulously crafted rubrics. This approach gives rise to the inference-time scaling of verification, wherein an agent self-improves by evaluating its generated answers to produce iterative feedback and refinements. We derive the rubrics based on an automatically constructed DRA Failure Taxonomy, which systematically classifies agent failures into five major categories and thirteen sub-categories. We present DeepVerifier, a rubrics-based outcome reward verifier that leverages the asymmetry of verification and outperforms vanilla agent-as-judge and LLM judge baselines by 12%-48% in meta-evaluation F1 score. To enable practical self-evolution, DeepVerifier integrates as a plug-and-play module during test-time inference. The verifier produces detailed rubric-based feedback, which is fed back to the agent for iterative bootstrapping, refining responses without additional training. This test-time scaling delivers 8%-11% accuracy gains on challenging subsets of GAIA and XBench-DeepResearch when powered by capable closed-source LLMs. Finally, to support open-source advancement, we release DeepVerifier-4K, a curated supervised fine-tuning dataset of 4,646 high-quality agent steps focused on DRA verification. These examples emphasize reflection and self-critique, enabling open models to develop robust verification capabilities.

Zaitang Li, Pin-Yu Chen, Tsung-Yi Ho

Current studies on adversarial robustness mainly focus on aggregating local robustness results from a set of data samples to evaluate and rank different models. However, the local statistics may not well represent the true global robustness of the underlying unknown data distribution. To address this challenge, this paper makes the first attempt to present a new framework, called GREAT Score , for global robustness evaluation of adversarial perturbation using generative models. Formally, GREAT Score carries the physical meaning of a global statistic capturing a mean certified attack-proof perturbation level over all samples drawn from a generative model. For finite-sample evaluation, we also derive a probabilistic guarantee on the sample complexity and the difference between the sample mean and the true mean. GREAT Score has several advantages: (1) Robustness evaluations using GREAT Score are efficient and scalable to large models, by sparing the need of running adversarial attacks. In particular, we show high correlation and significantly reduced computation cost of GREAT Score when compared to the attack-based model ranking on RobustBench (Croce,et. al. 2021). (2) The use of generative models facilitates the approximation of the unknown data distribution. In our ablation study with different generative adversarial networks (GANs), we observe consistency between global robustness evaluation and the quality of GANs. (3) GREAT Score can be used for remote auditing of privacy-sensitive black-box models, as demonstrated by our robustness evaluation on several online facial recognition services.

Yucheng Shi, Wenhao Yu, Zaitang Li et al.

Recently, there has been a surge of vision-based GUI agents designed to automate everyday mobile and web tasks. These agents interpret raw GUI screenshots and autonomously decide where to click, scroll, or type, which bypasses handcrafted rules and app-specific APIs. However, most existing methods trained GUI agent in the offline environment using pre-collected trajectories. This approach limits scalability, causes overfitting to specific UI templates, and leads to brittle policies when faced with unseen environment. We present MobileGUI-RL, a scalable framework that trains GUI agent in online environment. MobileGUI-RL contains two key components. It (i) synthesizes a curriculum of learnable tasks through self-exploration and filtering, and (ii) adapts GRPO to GUI navigation with trajectory-aware advantages and composite rewards that balance task success and execution efficiency. Experiments on three online mobile-agent benchmarks show consistent gains, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Zaitang Li, Pin-Yu Chen, Tsung-Yi Ho

The emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is a significant advancement in integrating computer vision with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance multi-modal machine learning capabilities. However, this progress has also made VLMs vulnerable to sophisticated adversarial attacks, raising concerns about their reliability. The objective of this paper is to assess the resilience of VLMs against jailbreak attacks that can compromise model safety compliance and result in harmful outputs. To evaluate a VLM's ability to maintain its robustness against adversarial input perturbations, we propose a novel metric called the \textbf{Retention Score}. Retention Score is a multi-modal evaluation metric that includes Retention-I and Retention-T scores for quantifying jailbreak risks in visual and textual components of VLMs. Our process involves generating synthetic image-text pairs using a conditional diffusion model. These pairs are then predicted for toxicity score by a VLM alongside a toxicity judgment classifier. By calculating the margin in toxicity scores, we can quantify the robustness of the VLM in an attack-agnostic manner. Our work has four main contributions. First, we prove that Retention Score can serve as a certified robustness metric. Second, we demonstrate that most VLMs with visual components are less robust against jailbreak attacks than the corresponding plain VLMs. Additionally, we evaluate black-box VLM APIs and find that the security settings in Google Gemini significantly affect the score and robustness. Moreover, the robustness of GPT4V is similar to the medium settings of Gemini. Finally, our approach offers a time-efficient alternative to existing adversarial attack methods and provides consistent model robustness rankings when evaluated on VLMs including MiniGPT-4, InstructBLIP, and LLaVA.

Wenhao Yu, Chenguang Zhu, Zaitang Li et al.

The goal of text generation is to make machines express in human language. It is one of the most important yet challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Since 2014, various neural encoder-decoder models pioneered by Seq2Seq have been proposed to achieve the goal by learning to map input text to output text. However, the input text alone often provides limited knowledge to generate the desired output, so the performance of text generation is still far from satisfaction in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, researchers have considered incorporating various forms of knowledge beyond the input text into the generation models. This research direction is known as knowledge-enhanced text generation. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of the research on knowledge enhanced text generation over the past five years. The main content includes two parts: (i) general methods and architectures for integrating knowledge into text generation; (ii) specific techniques and applications according to different forms of knowledge data. This survey can have broad audiences, researchers and practitioners, in academia and industry.