12.2HCMay 15Code
TopoClaw: A Human-Centric and Topology-Aware Agent Operating SystemHeyuan Huang, Yeyi Guan, Jihong Wang et al.
Large language models (LLMs) have evolved AI assistants into autonomous reasoning engines that maintain context, invoke tools, and pursue long-horizon tasks. This has spurred Agent Operating Systems (Agent OS) as kernel-like layers for lifecycle management, memory, scheduling, and access control. Yet most designs remain agent-centric, treating the OS as a single-host runtime for internal reasoning and tool use, leaving open how autonomous actions integrate with distributed, collaborative, permission-sensitive workflows. TopoClaw is an open-source, human-centric, topology-aware Agent OS modeling the user's ecosystem as two coupled structures: a physical device topology of heterogeneous surfaces and a social relationship topology of shared spaces, teams, and delegated roles. It unifies device operation, messaging, and skills around accountable cross-boundary execution, with three core contributions: (1) cross-device action placement, decoupling intent from actuation and routing distributed actions across the device cluster based on hardware affordances and user context; (2) cross-user identity attribution, treating agents as socially situated "Digital Twins" that coordinate in multi-user spaces while preserving provenance, role-aware permissions, and human accountability; (3) cross-context authority governance, pairing broad capability with distributed, context-aware policy enforcement across physical and social trust boundaries to bound proactive autonomy at the OS layer. This report presents TopoClaw as an engineering-oriented reference architecture, covering its design principles, runtime, cross-device execution, collaboration mechanisms, security model, and deployment outlook.
VeriOS: Query-Driven Proactive Human-Agent-GUI Interaction for Trustworthy OS AgentsZheng Wu, Heyuan Huang, Xingyu Lou et al.
With the rapid progress of multimodal large language models, operating system (OS) agents become increasingly capable of automating tasks through on-device graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, most existing OS agents are designed for idealized settings, whereas real-world environments often present untrustworthy conditions. To mitigate risks of over-execution in such scenarios, we propose a query-driven human-agent-GUI interaction framework that enables OS agents to decide when to query humans for more reliable task completion. Built upon this framework, we introduce VeriOS-Agent, a trustworthy OS agent trained with a two-stage learning paradigm that falicitate the decoupling and utilization of meta-knowledge. Concretely, VeriOS-Agent autonomously executes actions in normal conditions while proactively querying humans in untrustworthy scenarios. Experiments show that VeriOS-Agent improves the average step-wise success rate by 20.64\% in untrustworthy scenarios over the state-of-the-art, without compromising normal performance. Analysis highlights VeriOS-Agent's rationality, generalizability, and scalability. The codes, datasets and models are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/VeriOS.
6.9IRApr 15
From Transfer to Collaboration: A Federated Framework for Cross-Market Sequential RecommendationJundong Chen, Honglei Zhang, Xiangmou Qu et al.
Cross-market recommendation (CMR) aims to enhance recommendation performance across multiple markets. Due to its inherent characteristics, i.e., data isolation, non-overlapping users, and market heterogeneity, CMR introduces unique challenges and fundamentally differs from cross-domain recommendation (CDR). Existing CMR approaches largely inherit CDR by adopting the one-to-one transfer paradigm, where a model is pretrained on a source market and then fine-tuned on a target market. However, such a paradigm suffers from CH1. source degradation, where the source market sacrifices its own performance for the target markets, and CH2. negative transfer, where market heterogeneity leads to suboptimal performance in target markets. To address these challenges, we propose FeCoSR, a novel federated collaboration framework for cross-market sequential recommendation. Specifically, to tackle CH1, we introduce a many-to-many collaboration paradigm that enables all markets to jointly participate in and benefit from training. It consists of a federated pretraining stage for capturing shared behavior-level patterns, followed by local fine-tuning for market-specific item-level preferences. For CH2, we theoretically and empirically show that vanilla Cross-Entropy (CE) exacerbates market heterogeneity, undermining federated optimization. To address this, we propose a Semantic Soft Cross-Entropy (S^2CE) that leverages shared semantic information to facilitate collaborative behavioral learning across markets. Then, we design a market-specific adaptation module during fine-tuning to capture local item preferences. Extensive experiments on the real-world datasets demonstrate the advantages of FeCoSR over other methods.
16.6CLJun 12
Retrospective Progress-Aware Self-Refinement for LLM Agent TrainingXinbei Ma, Congmin Zheng, Jiyang Qiu et al.
LLM-based agents trained with reinforcement learning optimize step-wise action prediction but lack metacognitive awareness of task progress, inducing a gap that hinders long-horizon scaling. A pilot study reveals that online progress prompting hurts performance while retrospective demonstrations help, yet this capability cannot emerge from outcome-reward training alone. We present RePro, Retrospective Progress-Aware Training, a framework that trains agents to self-generate progress signals via a forward-then-reflect rollout paradigm: the agent executes actions online, then retrospectively reassesses its step-wise progress given the completed trajectory and known outcome. RePro initializes with a Retrospection Warmup that teaches reflection format from minimal external demonstrations, then further trains through RePro-PO with a composite reward that produces self-generated signals without continuous external supervision. Experiments on WebShop, ALFWorld, and Sokoban show that RePro enhances the Qwen family's performance, with up to $12\%$ absolute success rate gains.
20.7AIJun 12
Communication Policy Evolution for Proactive LLM AgentsXinbei Ma, Jiyang Qiu, Yao Yao et al.
LLM agents have rapidly evolved into autonomous systems, yet a persistent information gap remains between users and agents: communication is costly, while users' identical preferences further limit information exchange. To investigate how agents should communicate across modalities, this paper formalizes Communication Policy, establishes textual and UI-based policies, and then evaluates communication policies across diverse environments, personas, and model combinations. Building information asymmetry for proactive agents, we set up two complementary settings, User-Agent and Planner-Executor. Experimental results reveal complementary strengths between interaction channels: text-based interaction often facilitates task performance, while structured UI improves agents' response quality and persona compliance. Motivated by that, a hybrid method combines these advantages. We further propose Communication Policy Evolution (CPE), a self-evolution framework for refining communication policies through rollout and prompt-level evolving. Without model modification, CPE achieves the best task success across multiple settings using prompt refinement alone. Our findings identify communication behavior as a critical yet underexplored design dimension for LLM agents.
16.9LGJan 9, 2025
FedSA: A Unified Representation Learning via Semantic Anchors for Prototype-based Federated LearningYanbing Zhou, Xiangmou Qu, Chenlong You et al.
Prototype-based federated learning has emerged as a promising approach that shares lightweight prototypes to transfer knowledge among clients with data heterogeneity in a model-agnostic manner. However, existing methods often collect prototypes directly from local models, which inevitably introduce inconsistencies into representation learning due to the biased data distributions and differing model architectures among clients. In this paper, we identify that both statistical and model heterogeneity create a vicious cycle of representation inconsistency, classifier divergence, and skewed prototype alignment, which negatively impacts the performance of clients. To break the vicious cycle, we propose a novel framework named Federated Learning via Semantic Anchors (FedSA) to decouple the generation of prototypes from local representation learning. We introduce a novel perspective that uses simple yet effective semantic anchors serving as prototypes to guide local models in learning consistent representations. By incorporating semantic anchors, we further propose anchor-based regularization with margin-enhanced contrastive learning and anchor-based classifier calibration to correct feature extractors and calibrate classifiers across clients, achieving intra-class compactness and inter-class separability of prototypes while ensuring consistent decision boundaries. We then update the semantic anchors with these consistent and discriminative prototypes, which iteratively encourage clients to collaboratively learn a unified data representation with robust generalization. Extensive experiments under both statistical and model heterogeneity settings show that FedSA significantly outperforms existing prototype-based FL methods on various classification tasks.