Zhining Zhang

CocoaBench Team, Shibo Hao, Zhining Zhang et al.

LLM agents now perform strongly in software engineering, deep research, GUI automation, and various other applications, while recent agent scaffolds and models are increasingly integrating these capabilities into unified systems. Yet, most evaluations still test these capabilities in isolation, which leaves a gap for more diverse use cases that require agents to combine different capabilities. We introduce CocoaBench, a benchmark for unified digital agents built from human-designed, long-horizon tasks that require flexible composition of vision, search, and coding. Tasks are specified only by an instruction and an automatic evaluation function over the final output, enabling reliable and scalable evaluation across diverse agent infrastructures. We also present CocoaAgent, a lightweight shared scaffold for controlled comparison across model backbones. Experiments show that current agents remain far from reliable on CocoaBench, with the best evaluated system achieving only 45.1% success rate. Our analysis further points to substantial room for improvement in reasoning and planning, tool use and execution, and visual grounding.

Shunchi Zhang, Jin Lu, Chuanyang Jin et al.

Effective real-world assistance requires AI agents with robust Theory of Mind (ToM): inferring human mental states from their behavior. Despite recent advances, several key challenges remain, including (1) online inference with robust uncertainty updates over multiple hypotheses; (2) efficient reasoning suitable for real-time assistance; and (3) the lack of ground-truth mental state annotations in real-world domains. We address these challenges by introducing MindZero, a self-supervised reinforcement learning framework that trains multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for efficient and robust online mental reasoning. During training, the model is rewarded for generating mental state hypotheses that maximize the likelihood of observed actions estimated by a planner, similar to model-based ToM reasoning. This method thus eliminates the need for explicit mental state annotations. After training, MindZero internalizes model-based reasoning into fast single-pass inference. We evaluate MindZero against baselines across challenging mental reasoning and AI assistance tasks in gridworld and household domains. We found that LLMs alone are insufficient; model-based methods improve accuracy but are slow, costly, and limited by backbone MLLM capacity. In contrast, MindZero enhances MLLMs' intrinsic ToM ability and significantly outperforms model-based methods in both accuracy and efficiency, showing that mental reasoning can be effectively learned as a self-supervised skill.

Dacheng Liao, Mengshi Qi, Peng Shu et al.

Current Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based end-to-end autonomous driving systems often leverage large language models to generate driving decisions directly based on their understanding of the current scene. However, such systems introduce multiple risks in real-world driving scenarios. To evaluate whether VLMs are truly viable for autonomous driving, we introduce RoboDriveBench, the first robustness benchmark focused on end-to-end trajectory prediction tasks. This benchmark systematically evaluates two critical categories of real-world challenges for VLM-based end-to-end autonomous driving systems through 11 simulated scenarios encompassing various corruption types, including 6 scenarios of sensor corruption caused by environmental variations, along with 5 cases of prompt corruption resulting from human intervention and data transmission failures. Each corruption type includes 250 unique driving scenarios and 5,689 frames, resulting in 64,559 total trajectory prediction cases per evaluation. To overcome these real-world challenges, we propose a novel VLM-based autonomous driving framework called RoboDriveVLM, which enhances robustness by mapping more multimodal data-e.g., lidar and radar-into a unified latent space. Furthermore, we introduce a new Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) method based on cross-modal knowledge distillation to improve the robustness of VLM-based autonomous driving systems. Through extensive experiments, our work highlights the limitations of current VLM-based end-to-end autonomous driving systems and provides a more reliable solution for real-world deployment. Source code and datasets will be released.

Zhining Zhang, Chuanyang Jin, Mung Yao Jia et al.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people's minds based on their behavior, is key to developing socially intelligent agents. Current approaches to ToM reasoning either rely on prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), which are prone to systematic errors, or use handcrafted, rigid agent models for model-based inference, which are more robust but fail to generalize across domains. In this work, we introduce AutoToM, an automated agent modeling method for scalable, robust, and interpretable mental inference. Given a ToM problem, AutoToM first proposes an initial agent model and then performs automated Bayesian inverse planning based on this model, leveraging an LLM backend. Guided by inference uncertainty, it iteratively refines the model by introducing additional mental variables and/or incorporating more timesteps in the context. Across five diverse benchmarks, AutoToM outperforms existing ToM methods and even large reasoning models. Additionally, we show that AutoToM can produce human-like confidence estimates and enable online mental inference for embodied decision-making.