Yanning Hou

Yanning Hou, Duanyang Yuan, Sihang Zhou et al.

Recent GraphRAG methods integrate graph structures into text indexing and retrieval, using knowledge graph triples to connect text chunks, thereby improving retrieval coverage and precision. However, we observe that treating text chunks as the basic unit of knowledge representation rigidly groups multiple atomic facts together, limiting the flexibility and adaptability needed to support diverse retrieval scenarios. Additionally, triple-based entity linking is sensitive to relation-extraction errors, which can lead to missing or incorrect reasoning paths and ultimately hurt retrieval accuracy. To address these issues, we propose the Atom-Entity Graph, a more precise and reliable architecture for knowledge representation and indexing. In our approach, knowledge is stored as knowledge atoms, namely individual, self-contained units of factual information, rather than coarse-grained text chunks. This allows knowledge elements to be flexibly reassembled without mutual interference, thereby enabling seamless alignment with diverse query perspectives. Edges between entities simply indicate whether a relationship exists. By combining personalized PageRank with relevance-based filtering, we maintain accurate entity connections and improve the reliability of reasoning. Theoretical analysis and experiments on five public benchmarks show that the proposed AtomicRAG algorithm outperforms strong RAG baselines in retrieval accuracy and reasoning robustness. Code: https://github.com/7HHHHH/AtomicRAG.

Yanning Hou, Peiyuan Li, Zirui Liu et al.

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) requires detecting and localizing anomalies without access to target-class anomaly samples. Mainstream methods rely on vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP: they build hand-crafted or learned prompt sets for normal and abnormal semantics, then compute image-text similarities for open-set discrimination. While effective, this paradigm depends on a text encoder and cross-modal alignment, which can lead to training instability and parameter redundancy. This work revisits the necessity of the text branch in ZSAD and presents VisualAD, a purely visual framework built on Vision Transformers. We introduce two learnable tokens within a frozen backbone to directly encode normality and abnormality. Through multi-layer self-attention, these tokens interact with patch tokens, gradually acquiring high-level notions of normality and anomaly while guiding patches to highlight anomaly-related cues. Additionally, we incorporate a Spatial-Aware Cross-Attention (SCA) module and a lightweight Self-Alignment Function (SAF): SCA injects fine-grained spatial information into the tokens, and SAF recalibrates patch features before anomaly scoring. VisualAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on 13 zero-shot anomaly detection benchmarks spanning industrial and medical domains, and adapts seamlessly to pretrained vision backbones such as the CLIP image encoder and DINOv2. Code: https://github.com/7HHHHH/VisualAD

Duanyang Yuan, Sihang Zhou, Yanning Hou et al.

Behavior sequences, composed of executable steps, serve as the operational foundation for multi-constraint planning problems such as travel planning. In such tasks, each planning step is not only constrained locally but also influenced by global constraints spanning multiple subtasks, leading to a tightly coupled and complex decision process. Existing travel planning methods typically rely on a single decision space that entangles all subtasks and constraints, failing to distinguish between locally acting constraints within a subtask and global constraints that span multiple subtasks. Consequently, the model is forced to jointly reason over local and global constraints at each decision step, increasing the reasoning burden and reducing planning efficiency. To address this problem, we propose the Behavior Forest method. Specifically, our approach structures the decision-making process into a forest of parallel behavior trees, where each behavior tree is responsible for a subtask. A global coordination mechanism is introduced to orchestrate the interactions among these trees, enabling modular and coherent travel planning. Within this framework, large language models are embedded as decision engines within behavior tree nodes, performing localized reasoning conditioned on task-specific constraints to generate candidate subplans and adapt decisions based on coordination feedback. The behavior trees, in turn, provide an explicit control structure that guides LLM generation. This design decouples complex tasks and constraints into manageable subspaces, enabling task-specific reasoning and reducing the cognitive load of LLM. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.67% on the TravelPlanner and by 11.82% on the ChinaTravel benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in increasing LLM performance for complex multi-constraint travel planning.

Xirui Liu, Sihang Zhou, Yanning Hou et al.

Web agents require both high-level reasoning (for task decomposition) and low-level interactions (for page elements manipulation) to conduct different tasks. However, these knowledge types differ fundamentally: reasoning knowledge (e.g., booking a flight requires first searching for routes) is abstract and transferable across websites, while interaction knowledge (e.g., clicking the Search button at a specific coordinate on Site A) depends heavily on page-specific contexts. Existing methods store experiences uniformly. This creates a dilemma: abstract representations lose executability on concrete pages, while concrete representations fail to generalize across domains. This entanglement limits capability accumulation: on new websites, agents either fail to recognize reusable task logic due to surface-level differences or attempt infeasible actions from outdated page structures. To disentangle them, we propose DRIVE, a dual-level skill modeling framework separating historical experience into natural language reasoning skills, which capture transferable task logic, and programmatic interaction skills, grounding abstract actions to executable operations. A scene-aware coordination mechanism adaptively retrieves and invokes these dual-level skills based on task semantics. DRIVE also uses skill-level reflection to identify hierarchy-specific failure modes, enabling targeted skill library expansion and refinement. Experiments across five WebArena domains show DRIVE attains an average task success rate of 52.8%, exceeding the skill-free baseline by 7.3 percentage points. Further ablations show reasoning and interaction skills provide distinct, complementary benefits, supporting separation of transferable task logic from executable page-level operations.

Yanning Hou, Ke Xu, Junfa Li et al.

Recently, the powerful generalization ability exhibited by foundation models has brought forth new solutions for zero-shot anomaly segmentation tasks. However, guiding these foundation models correctly to address downstream tasks remains a challenge. This paper proposes a novel two-stage framework, for zero-shot anomaly segmentation tasks in industrial anomaly detection. This framework excellently leverages the powerful anomaly localization capability of CLIP and the boundary perception ability of SAM.(1) To mitigate SAM's inclination towards object segmentation, we propose the Co-Feature Point Prompt Generation (PPG) module. This module collaboratively utilizes CLIP and SAM to generate positive and negative point prompts, guiding SAM to focus on segmenting anomalous regions rather than the entire object. (2) To further optimize SAM's segmentation results and mitigate rough boundaries and isolated noise, we introduce the Cascaded Prompts for SAM (CPS) module. This module employs hybrid prompts cascaded with a lightweight decoder of SAM, achieving precise segmentation of anomalous regions. Across multiple datasets, consistent experimental validation demonstrates that our approach achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot anomaly segmentation results. Particularly noteworthy is our performance on the Visa dataset, where we outperform the state-of-the-art methods by 10.3\% and 7.7\% in terms of {$F_1$-max} and AP metrics, respectively.

Yanning Hou, Yanran Ruan, Junfa Li et al.

Enhancing the alignment between text and image features in the CLIP model is a critical challenge in zero-shot industrial anomaly detection tasks. Recent studies predominantly utilize specific category prompts during pretraining, which can cause overfitting to the training categories and limit model generalization. To address this, we propose a method that transforms category names through multicategory name stacking to create stacked prompts, forming the basis of our StackCLIP model. Our approach introduces two key components. The Clustering-Driven Stacked Prompts (CSP) module constructs generic prompts by stacking semantically analogous categories, while utilizing multi-object textual feature fusion to amplify discriminative anomalies among similar objects. The Ensemble Feature Alignment (EFA) module trains knowledge-specific linear layers tailored for each stack cluster and adaptively integrates them based on the attributes of test categories. These modules work together to deliver superior training speed, stability, and convergence, significantly boosting anomaly segmentation performance. Additionally, our stacked prompt framework offers robust generalization across classification tasks. To further improve performance, we introduce the Regulating Prompt Learning (RPL) module, which leverages the generalization power of stacked prompts to refine prompt learning, elevating results in anomaly detection classification tasks. Extensive testing on seven industrial anomaly detection datasets demonstrates that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both zero-shot anomaly detection and segmentation tasks.