Guochen Yan

Qintong Zhang, Xinjie Lv, Jialong Wu et al.

Document Question Answering (DocQA) focuses on answering questions grounded in given documents, yet existing DocQA agents lack effective tool utilization and largely rely on closed-source models. In this work, we introduce DocDancer, an end-to-end trained open-source Doc agent. We formulate DocQA as an information-seeking problem and propose a tool-driven agent framework that explicitly models document exploration and comprehension. To enable end-to-end training of such agents, we introduce an Exploration-then-Synthesis data synthesis pipeline that addresses the scarcity of high-quality training data for DocQA. Training on the synthesized data, the trained models on two long-context document understanding benchmarks, MMLongBench-Doc and DocBench, show their effectiveness. Further analysis provides valuable insights for the agentic tool design and synthetic data.

Xunkai Li, Yinlin Zhu, Boyang Pang et al.

Federated graph learning (FGL) is a promising distributed training paradigm for graph neural networks across multiple local systems without direct data sharing. This approach inherently involves large-scale distributed graph processing, which closely aligns with the challenges and research focuses of graph-based data systems. Despite the proliferation of FGL, the diverse motivations from real-world applications, spanning various research backgrounds and settings, pose a significant challenge to fair evaluation. To fill this gap, we propose OpenFGL, a unified benchmark designed for the primary FGL scenarios: Graph-FL and Subgraph-FL. Specifically, OpenFGL includes 42 graph datasets from 18 application domains, 8 federated data simulation strategies that emphasize different graph properties, and 5 graph-based downstream tasks. Additionally, it offers 18 recently proposed SOTA FGL algorithms through a user-friendly API, enabling a thorough comparison and comprehensive evaluation of their effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency. Our empirical results demonstrate the capabilities of FGL while also highlighting its potential limitations, providing valuable insights for future research in this growing field, particularly in fostering greater interdisciplinary collaboration between FGL and data systems.

Huanyao Zhang, Jiepeng Zhou, Bo Li et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), equipped with increasingly advanced planning and tool-use capabilities, are evolving into autonomous agents capable of performing multimodal web browsing and deep search in open-world environments. However, existing benchmarks for multimodal browsing remain limited in task complexity, evidence accessibility, and evaluation granularity, hindering comprehensive and reproducible assessments of deep search capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce BrowseComp-$V^3$, a novel benchmark consisting of 300 carefully curated and challenging questions spanning diverse domains. The benchmark emphasizes deep, multi-level, and cross-modal multi-hop reasoning, where critical evidence is interleaved across textual and visual modalities within and across web pages. All supporting evidence is strictly required to be publicly searchable, ensuring fairness and reproducibility. Beyond final-answer accuracy, we incorporate an expert-validated, subgoal-driven process evaluation mechanism that enables fine-grained analysis of intermediate reasoning behaviors and systematic characterization of capability boundaries. In addition, we propose OmniSeeker, a unified multimodal browsing agent framework integrating diverse web search and visual perception tools. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models achieve only 36% accuracy on our benchmark, revealing critical bottlenecks in multimodal information integration and fine-grained perception. Our results highlight a fundamental gap between current model capabilities and robust multimodal deep search in real-world settings.

Zhou Liu, Zhaoyang Han, Guochen Yan et al.

Data governance ensures data quality, security, and compliance through policies and standards, a critical foundation for scaling modern AI development. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising solution for automating data governance by translating user intent into executable transformation code. However, existing benchmarks for automated data science often emphasize snippet-level coding or high-level analytics, failing to capture the unique challenge of data governance: ensuring the correctness and quality of the data itself. To bridge this gap, we introduce DataGovBench, a benchmark featuring 150 diverse tasks grounded in real-world scenarios, built on data from actual cases. DataGovBench employs a novel "reversed-objective" methodology to synthesize realistic noise and utilizes rigorous metrics to assess end-to-end pipeline reliability. Our analysis on DataGovBench reveals that current models struggle with complex, multi-step workflows and lack robust error-correction mechanisms. Consequently, we propose DataGovAgent, a framework utilizing a Planner-Executor-Evaluator architecture that integrates constraint-based planning, retrieval-augmented generation, and sandboxed feedback-driven debugging. Experimental results show that DataGovAgent significantly boosts the Average Task Score (ATS) on complex tasks from 39.7 to 54.9 and reduces debugging iterations by over 77.9 percent compared to general-purpose baselines.

Zhengwei Tao, Bo Li, Jialong Wu et al.

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) empowers large language models to autonomously plan and retrieve information for complex problem-solving. However, the development of robust agents is hindered by the scarcity of high-quality training data that reflects the noise and complexity of real-world retrieval environments. Conventional manual annotation is unscalable and often fails to capture the dynamic reasoning strategies required to handle retrieval failures. To bridge this gap, we introduce RAGShaper, a novel data synthesis framework designed to automate the construction of RAG tasks and robust agent trajectories. RAGShaper incorporates an InfoCurator to build dense information trees enriched with adversarial distractors spanning Perception and Cognition levels. Furthermore, we propose a constrained navigation strategy that forces a teacher agent to confront these distractors, thereby eliciting trajectories that explicitly demonstrate error correction and noise rejection. Comprehensive experiments confirm that models trained on our synthesized corpus significantly outperform existing baselines, exhibiting superior robustness in noise-intensive and complex retrieval tasks.

Guochen Yan, Luyuan Xie, Xinyi Gao et al.

Federated learning has become a promising solution for collaboration among medical institutions. However, data owned by each institution would be highly heterogeneous and the distribution is always non-independent and identical distribution (non-IID), resulting in client drift and unsatisfactory performance. Despite existing federated learning methods attempting to solve the non-IID problems, they still show marginal advantages but rely on frequent communication which would incur high costs and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning method: \textbf{Fed}erated learning via \textbf{V}aluable \textbf{C}ondensed \textbf{K}nowledge (FedVCK). We enhance the quality of condensed knowledge and select the most necessary knowledge guided by models, to tackle the non-IID problem within limited communication budgets effectively. Specifically, on the client side, we condense the knowledge of each client into a small dataset and further enhance the condensation procedure with latent distribution constraints, facilitating the effective capture of high-quality knowledge. During each round, we specifically target and condense knowledge that has not been assimilated by the current model, thereby preventing unnecessary repetition of homogeneous knowledge and minimizing the frequency of communications required. On the server side, we propose relational supervised contrastive learning to provide more supervision signals to aid the global model updating. Comprehensive experiments across various medical tasks show that FedVCK can outperform state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating that it's non-IID robust and communication-efficient.

Guochen Yan, Xunkai Li, Luyuan Xie et al.

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for breaking data silos among distributed private graphs. In practical scenarios involving heterogeneous distributed graph data, personalized Federated Graph Learning (pFGL) aims to enhance model utility by training personalized models tailored to client needs. However, existing pFGL methods often require numerous communication rounds under heterogeneous graphs, leading to significant communication overhead and security concerns. While One-shot Federated Learning (OFL) enables collaboration in a single round, existing OFL methods are designed for image-centric tasks and are ineffective for graph data, leaving a critical gap in the field. Additionally, personalized models derived from existing methods suffer from bias, failing to effectively generalize to the minority. To address these challenges, we propose the first \textbf{O}ne-shot \textbf{p}ersonalized \textbf{F}ederated \textbf{G}raph \textbf{L}earning method (\textbf{O-pFGL}) for node classification, compatible with Secure Aggregation protocols for privacy preservation. Specifically, for effective graph learning in one communication round, our method estimates and aggregates class-wise feature distribution statistics to construct a global surrogate graph on the server, facilitating the training of a global graph model. To mitigate bias, we introduce a two-stage personalized training approach that adaptively balances local personal information and global insights from the surrogate graph, improving both personalization and generalization. Extensive experiments on 14 diverse real-world graph datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across various settings.

Luyuan Xie, Tianyu Luan, Wenyuan Cai et al.

Federated learning has wide applications in the medical field. It enables knowledge sharing among different healthcare institutes while protecting patients' privacy. However, existing federated learning systems are typically centralized, requiring clients to upload client-specific knowledge to a central server for aggregation. This centralized approach would integrate the knowledge from each client into a centralized server, and the knowledge would be already undermined during the centralized integration before it reaches back to each client. Besides, the centralized approach also creates a dependency on the central server, which may affect training stability if the server malfunctions or connections are unstable. To address these issues, we propose a decentralized federated learning framework named dFLMoE. In our framework, clients directly exchange lightweight head models with each other. After exchanging, each client treats both local and received head models as individual experts, and utilizes a client-specific Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach to make collective decisions. This design not only reduces the knowledge damage with client-specific aggregations but also removes the dependency on the central server to enhance the robustness of the framework. We validate our framework on multiple medical tasks, demonstrating that our method evidently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under both model homogeneity and heterogeneity settings.

Guochen Yan, Luyuan Xie, Qingni Shen et al.

The current paradigm of training large language models (LLMs) on publicly available Web data is becoming unsustainable, with high-quality data sources in specialized domains nearing exhaustion. Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a practical solution for the next generation of AI on a decentralized Web, enabling privacy-preserving collaborative fine-tuning by leveraging private data distributed across a global client base. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is the standard for efficient fine-tuning, its application in federated settings presents a critical challenge: communication overhead remains a significant bottleneck across the Web's heterogeneous network conditions. The structural redundancy within LoRA parameters not only incurs a heavy communication burden but also introduces conflicts when aggregating client updates. To address this, we propose FedSRD, a Sparsify-Reconstruct-Decompose framework designed for communication-efficient federated LLMs fine-tuning. We first introduce an importance-aware sparsification method that preserves the structural integrity of LoRA updates to reduce the uploaded parameter count. The server then reconstructs and aggregates these updates in a full-rank space to mitigate conflicts. Finally, it decomposes the global update into a sparse low-rank format for broadcast, ensuring a symmetrically efficient cycle. We also propose an efficient variant, FedSRD-e, to reduce computational overhead. Experimental results on 10 benchmarks demonstrate that our framework significantly reduces communication costs by up to 90\% while even improving model performance on heterogeneous client data.

Zhengyu Wu, Xunkai Li, Yinlin Zhu et al.

In the era of big data applications, Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has emerged as a prominent solution that reconcile the tradeoff between optimizing the collective intelligence between decentralized datasets holders and preserving sensitive information to maximum. Existing FGL surveys have contributed meaningfully but largely focus on integrating Federated Learning (FL) and Graph Machine Learning (GML), resulting in early stage taxonomies that emphasis on methodology and simulated scenarios. Notably, a data centric perspective, which systematically examines FGL methods through the lens of data properties and usage, remains unadapted to reorganize FGL research, yet it is critical to assess how FGL studies manage to tackle data centric constraints to enhance model performances. This survey propose a two-level data centric taxonomy: Data Characteristics, which categorizes studies based on the structural and distributional properties of datasets used in FGL, and Data Utilization, which analyzes the training procedures and techniques employed to overcome key data centric challenges. Each taxonomy level is defined by three orthogonal criteria, each representing a distinct data centric configuration. Beyond taxonomy, this survey examines FGL integration with Pretrained Large Models, showcases realistic applications, and highlights future direction aligned with emerging trends in GML.