Andy Zhang

AI
h-index22
4papers
80citations
Novelty36%
AI Score42

4 Papers

AIMar 31
Let the Agent Steer: Closed-Loop Ranking Optimization via Influence Exchange

Yin Cheng, Liao Zhou, Xiyu Liang et al.

Recommendation ranking is fundamentally an influence allocation problem: a sorting formula distributes ranking influence among competing factors, and the business outcome depends on finding the optimal "exchange rates" among them. However, offline proxy metrics systematically misjudge how influence reallocation translates to online impact, with asymmetric bias across metrics that a single calibration factor cannot correct. We present Sortify, the first fully autonomous LLM-driven ranking optimization agent deployed in a large-scale production recommendation system. The agent reframes ranking optimization as continuous influence exchange, closing the full loop from diagnosis to parameter deployment without human intervention. It addresses structural problems through three mechanisms: (1) a dual-channel framework grounded in Savage's Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) that decouples offline-online transfer correction (Belief channel) from constraint penalty adjustment (Preference channel); (2) an LLM meta-controller operating on framework-level parameters rather than low-level search variables; (3) a persistent Memory DB with 7 relational tables for cross-round learning. Its core metric, Influence Share, provides a decomposable measure where all factor contributions sum to exactly 100%. Sortify has been deployed across two markets. In Country A, the agent pushed GMV from -3.6% to +9.2% within 7 rounds with peak orders reaching +12.5%. In Country B, a cold-start deployment achieved +4.15% GMV/UU and +3.58% Ads Revenue in a 7-day A/B test, leading to full production rollout.

CRApr 7, 2025
Frontier AI's Impact on the Cybersecurity Landscape

Yujin Potter, Wenbo Guo, Zhun Wang et al.

The impact of frontier AI in cybersecurity is rapidly increasing. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze this trend through three distinct lenses: a quantitative benchmark analysis, a literature review, and an expert survey. We find that while AI is already widely used in attacks, its application in defense remains limited, especially in remediation and deployment. Aligned with these analyses, experts expect AI to continue favoring attackers over defenders, though the gap will gradually narrow. These findings underscore the urgent need to mitigate frontier AI's risks while closely monitoring emerging capabilities. We provide concrete calls-to-action regarding: the construction of new cybersecurity benchmarks, the development of AI agents for defense, the design of provably secure AI agents, the improvement of pre-deployment security testing and transparency, and the strengthening of user-oriented education and defenses. Our paper summary and blog are available at https://rdi.berkeley.edu/frontier-ai-impact-on-cybersecurity/.

AIJul 3, 2025
Establishing Best Practices for Building Rigorous Agentic Benchmarks

Yuxuan Zhu, Tengjun Jin, Yada Pruksachatkun et al.

Benchmarks are essential for quantitatively tracking progress in AI. As AI agents become increasingly capable, researchers and practitioners have introduced agentic benchmarks to evaluate agents on complex, real-world tasks. These benchmarks typically measure agent capabilities by evaluating task outcomes via specific reward designs. However, we show that many agentic benchmarks have issues in task setup or reward design. For example, SWE-bench Verified uses insufficient test cases, while TAU-bench counts empty responses as successful. Such issues can lead to under- or overestimation of agents' performance by up to 100% in relative terms. To make agentic evaluation rigorous, we introduce the Agentic Benchmark Checklist (ABC), a set of guidelines that we synthesized from our benchmark-building experience, a survey of best practices, and previously reported issues. When applied to CVE-Bench, a benchmark with a particularly complex evaluation design, ABC reduces the performance overestimation by 33%.

CRNov 16, 2025
SeedAIchemy: LLM-Driven Seed Corpus Generation for Fuzzing

Aidan Wen, Norah A. Alzahrani, Jingzhi Jiang et al.

We introduce SeedAIchemy, an automated LLM-driven corpus generation tool that makes it easier for developers to implement fuzzing effectively. SeedAIchemy consists of five modules which implement different approaches at collecting publicly available files from the internet. Four of the five modules use large language model (LLM) workflows to construct search terms designed to maximize corpus quality. Corpora generated by SeedAIchemy perform significantly better than a naive corpus and similarly to a manually-curated corpus on a diverse range of target programs and libraries.