Li Song

Linxin Song, Yutong Dai, Viraj Prabhu et al.

Autonomous agents that operate computers via Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) often struggle with efficiency and reliability on complex, long-horizon tasks. While augmenting these agents with planners can improve task decomposition, they remain constrained by the inherent limitations of performing all actions through GUI manipulation, leading to brittleness and inefficiency. In this work, we introduce a more robust and flexible paradigm: enabling agents to use coding as a enhanced action. We present CoAct-1, a novel multi-agent system that synergistically combines GUI-based control with direct programmatic execution. CoAct-1 features an Orchestrator that dynamically delegates subtasks to either a conventional GUI Operator or a specialized Programmer agent, which can write and execute Python or Bash scripts. This hybrid approach allows the agent to bypass inefficient GUI action sequences for tasks like file management and data processing, while still leveraging visual interaction when necessary. We evaluate our system on the challenging OSWorld benchmark, where CoAct-1 achieves a new state-of-the-art success rate of 60.76%, significantly outperforming prior methods. Furthermore, our approach dramatically improves efficiency, reducing the average number of steps required to complete a task to just 10.15, compared to 15 for leading GUI agents. Our results demonstrate that integrating coding as a core action provides a more powerful, efficient, and scalable path toward generalized computer automation.

Linxin Song, Taiwei Shi, Jieyu Zhao

Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) has become a standard approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, its impact on model trustworthiness remains underexplored. In this work, we identify and systematically study a critical side effect of RFT, which we term the hallucination tax: a degradation in refusal behavior causing models to produce hallucinated answers to unanswerable questions confidently. To investigate this, we introduce SUM (Synthetic Unanswerable Math), a high-quality dataset of unanswerable math problems designed to probe models' ability to recognize an unanswerable question by reasoning from the insufficient or ambiguous information. Our results show that standard RFT training could reduce model refusal rates by more than 80%, which significantly increases model's tendency to hallucinate. We further demonstrate that incorporating just 10% SUM during RFT substantially restores appropriate refusal behavior, with minimal accuracy trade-offs on solvable tasks. Crucially, this approach enables LLMs to leverage inference-time compute to reason about their own uncertainty and knowledge boundaries, improving generalization not only to out-of-domain math problems but also to factual question answering tasks.

Shijian Wang, Linxin Song, Ryotaro Shimizu et al.

Zero-shot domain-specific image classification is challenging in classifying real images without ground-truth in-domain training examples. Recent research involved knowledge from texts with a text-to-image model to generate in-domain training images in zero-shot scenarios. However, existing methods heavily rely on simple prompt strategies, limiting the diversity of synthetic training images, thus leading to inferior performance compared to real images. In this paper, we propose AttrSyn, which leverages large language models to generate attributed prompts. These prompts allow for the generation of more diverse attributed synthetic images. Experiments for zero-shot domain-specific image classification on two fine-grained datasets show that training with synthetic images generated by AttrSyn significantly outperforms CLIP's zero-shot classification under most situations and consistently surpasses simple prompt strategies.

Chenggui Sun, Li Bin Song

In this work, we introduce a method and present an improved neural work to perform product re-identification, which is an essential core function of a fully automated product defect detection system. Our method is based on feature distance. It is the combination of feature extraction neural networks, such as VGG16, AlexNet, with an image search engine - Vearch. The dataset that we used to develop product re-identification systems is a water-bottle dataset that consists of 400 images of 18 types of water bottles. This is a small dataset, which was the biggest challenge of our work. However, the combination of neural networks with Vearch shows potential to tackle the product re-identification problems. Especially, our new neural network - AlphaAlexNet that a neural network was improved based on AlexNet could improve the production identification accuracy by four percent. This indicates that an ideal production identification accuracy could be achieved when efficient feature extraction methods could be introduced and redesigned for image feature extractions of nearly identical products. In order to solve the biggest challenges caused by the small size of the dataset and the difficult nature of identifying productions that have little differences from each other. In our future work, we propose a new roadmap to tackle nearly-identical production identifications: to introduce or develop new algorithms that need very few images to train themselves.