Haotian Shen

h-index17
2papers
887citations

2 Papers

11.6AIMay 24
PANDO: Efficient Multimodal AI Agents via Online Skill Distillation

Yubo Li, Yidi Miao, Haotian Shen et al.

Recent advances in multimodal web agents often rely on increased inference-time computation, including rollout search, verifier passes, offline skill discovery, and specialist model stacks. This raises a central question: can a web agent become more efficient as it accumulates experience, rather than more expensive? We first analyze trajectories from VisualWebArena and identify three recurring sources of inefficiency: repeat-action loops, hidden discovery costs, and low prompt-cache reuse. We then introduce PANDO, a single-rollout online skill-distillation framework that maintains a structured Skill Library and combines progress reflection, confidence-based skill demotion, hierarchical routing, visual compression, and cache-aware prompting. On the full set of 910 VisualWebArena tasks, PANDO achieves a 58.3% success rate, outperforming SGV (54.0%) and our WALT reproduction (45.2%), while using 58% fewer tokens than SGV and 61% fewer tokens than WALT, without any pre-evaluation discovery budget. A 300-task ablation further shows that rules and routines provide most of the success gains, while routing, compression, and cache-aware prompting convert the larger skill library into lower marginal token cost. Finally, we introduce three trajectory-level efficiency metrics -- Action Repetition Rate, Step Overhead Ratio, and Prompt Cache Utilization -- to make efficiency visible beyond terminal success.

10.1AISep 26, 2018Code
Evolving Agents for the Hanabi 2018 CIG Competition

Rodrigo Canaan, Haotian Shen, Ruben Rodriguez Torrado et al.

Hanabi is a cooperative card game with hidden information that has won important awards in the industry and received some recent academic attention. A two-track competition of agents for the game will take place in the 2018 CIG conference. In this paper, we develop a genetic algorithm that builds rule-based agents by determining the best sequence of rules from a fixed rule set to use as strategy. In three separate experiments, we remove human assumptions regarding the ordering of rules, add new, more expressive rules to the rule set and independently evolve agents specialized at specific game sizes. As result, we achieve scores superior to previously published research for the mirror and mixed evaluation of agents.