Xuhui Zhou

Xingyao Wang, Simon Rosenberg, Juan Michelini et al.

Agents are now used widely in the process of software development, but building production-ready software engineering agents is a complex task. Deploying software agents effectively requires flexibility in implementation and experimentation, reliable and secure execution, and interfaces for users to interact with agents. In this paper, we present the OpenHands Software Agent SDK, a toolkit for implementing software development agents that satisfy these desiderata. This toolkit is a complete architectural redesign of the agent components of the popular OpenHands framework for software development agents, which has 64k+ GitHub stars. To achieve flexibility, we design a simple interface for implementing agents that requires only a few lines of code in the default case, but is easily extensible to more complex, full-featured agents with features such as custom tools, memory management, and more. For security and reliability, it delivers seamless local-to-remote execution portability, integrated REST/WebSocket services. For interaction with human users, it can connect directly to a variety of interfaces, such as visual workspaces (VS Code, VNC, browser), command-line interfaces, and APIs. Compared with existing SDKs from OpenAI, Claude, and Google, OpenHands uniquely integrates native sandboxed execution, lifecycle control, model-agnostic multi-LLM routing, and built-in security analysis. Empirical results on SWE-Bench Verified and GAIA benchmarks demonstrate strong performance. Put together, these elements allow the OpenHands Software Agent SDK to provide a practical foundation for prototyping, unlocking new classes of custom applications, and reliably deploying agents at scale.

Jiaxin Ge, Zora Zhiruo Wang, Xuhui Zhou et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Designing structured visuals such as presentation slides is essential for communicative needs, necessitating both content creation and visual planning skills. In this work, we tackle the challenge of automated slide generation, where models produce slide presentations from natural language (NL) instructions. We first introduce the SlidesBench benchmark, the first benchmark for slide generation with 7k training and 585 testing examples derived from 310 slide decks across 10 domains. SlidesBench supports evaluations that are (i)reference-based to measure similarity to a target slide, and (ii)reference-free to measure the design quality of generated slides alone. We benchmark end-to-end image generation and program generation methods with a variety of models, and find that programmatic methods produce higher-quality slides in user-interactable formats. Built on the success of program generation, we create AutoPresent, an 8B Llama-based model trained on 7k pairs of instructions paired with code for slide generation, and achieve results comparable to the closed-source model GPT-4o. We further explore iterative design refinement where the model is tasked to self-refine its own output, and we found that this process improves the slide's quality. We hope that our work will provide a basis for future work on generating structured visuals.

Sanidhya Vijayvargiya, Xuhui Zhou, Akhila Yerukola et al. · allen-ai, cmu

AI agents are increasingly being deployed to automate tasks, often based on ambiguous and underspecified user instructions. Making unwarranted assumptions and failing to ask clarifying questions can lead to suboptimal outcomes, safety risks due to tool misuse, and wasted computational resources. In this work, we study the ability of LLM agents to handle ambiguous instructions in interactive code generation settings by evaluating proprietary and open-weight models on their performance across three key steps: (a) leveraging interactivity to improve performance in ambiguous scenarios, (b) detecting ambiguity, and (c) asking targeted questions. Our findings reveal that models struggle to distinguish between well-specified and underspecified instructions. However, when models interact for underspecified inputs, they effectively obtain vital information from the user, leading to significant improvements in performance and underscoring the value of effective interaction. Our study highlights critical gaps in how current state-of-the-art models handle ambiguity in complex software engineering tasks and structures the evaluation into distinct steps to enable targeted improvements.