arXiv subjects

Chao Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Chao Huang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

AgentBrew: Lifelong Knowledge Brewing from Strong Teachers to Weak LLM Agents

Deploying LLM agents typically requires a compact test-time student, even if a stronger teacher is available during training. We study knowledge brewing: distilling a teacher's interactive experience into a persistent external memory for the student. Crucially, this requires no weight updates, expert demonstrations, ground-truth labels, or test-time teacher access. This setting poses two challenges: environments provide only sparse, binary feedback, and teacher-authored notes must be inherently tailored to be concretely executable by a substantially weaker student. To address these hurdles, we propose AgentBrew, comprising two coupled components. First, a failure-triggered teacher--Ralph Loop mitigates sparse feedback by transforming student failures into environment-validated notes. Second, student-aware synthesis calibrates teacher knowledge to the weak executor's operational granularity, yielding model-specific, actionable guidance. Extensive evaluations and comprehensive ablations across coding, math, and tool-use tasks demonstrate that this asymmetric, training-free brewing paradigm produces highly capable yet deployable LLM agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

AdaTurn: Budget-Aware Test-Time Scaling for Active Visual Perception Agents

Active visual agents solve fine-grained image tasks by interleaving reasoning with image-grounding actions across multiple turns. However, deployment-time rollout budgets are rarely fixed: some requests permit long rollouts, while others require the agent to act under a tight turn limit. Existing methods train the policy as if the rollout budget were hidden, so when the available budget is smaller than the trajectory the agent prefers, the interaction is often truncated before any valid answer is produced; we term this failure \emph{catastrophic truncation}. To overcome this challenge, we present AdaTurn, a budget-aware framework that conditions the agent on the allowed number of turns and explicitly trains the boundary behavior induced by the budget. Our key component, Forced-Answer DAPO (FA-DAPO), converts the over-budget event from a masked or penalized failure into a trainable final-decision step, teaching the model to synthesize partial evidence when further tool use is no longer possible. We further randomize rollout budgets during both training and inference and introduce a load-balanced scheduler that makes such operations practical. AdaTurn substantially improves low-budget accuracy, for example raising VisualProbe-Medium from 36.7% to 47.6% at four turns, while preserving strong scaling at larger budgets and transferring effectively to multiple backbones and general multimodal benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DeepTutor: Towards Agentic Personalized Tutoring

Education is one of the most promising real-world applications for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current LLMs rely on static pre-training knowledge and lack adaptation to individual learners, while existing RAG systems fall short in delivering personalized, guided feedback. To bridge this gap, we present DeepTutor, a fully open-source agentic framework that unifies citation-grounded problem tutoring with difficulty-calibrated question generation. A hybrid personalization engine couples static knowledge grounding with dynamic learner memory, continuously adapting each interaction to the student's evolving needs. The same personalization substrate further extends to adaptive learning workflows, interactive books, and proactive multi-channel tutoring agents. To evaluate personalized tutoring, we introduce TutorBench, an interactive benchmark incorporating customized learner profiles grounded in university-level curricula across five domains. We further propose an LLM-based first-person interactive evaluation protocol that conducts assessments via a profile-driven student simulator. Complementary evaluations on established benchmarks, supported by human-alignment and ablation studies, confirm the framework's robustness and general utility. Results show that DeepTutor improves personalized metrics by 10.8\% on average and strengthens general agentic reasoning across five backbone models by 29.4\%.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

VideoAgent: All-in-One Framework for Video Understanding and Editing

Video editing has become essential in digital media creation, yet existing automated systems are restricted to short segment processing and domain-specific tasks. They face two critical limitations: i) inability to handle diverse video comprehension and editing operations, and ii) lack of long-video understanding for coherent narrative creation. We propose VideoAgent, an all-in-one agentic framework addressing these challenges through two key innovations. First, we develop automated video shot creation with shot planning agents for coherent narratives and cross-modal retrieval for aligned visual content. Second, we design a multi-agent orchestration framework integrating over thirty specialized editing agents. Intent parsing filters relevant tools while textual-gradient graph optimization assembles complex editing pipelines. Extensive experiments on our newly-proposed VideoEdit benchmark and public datasets demonstrate VideoAgent's superiority over existing multimodal LLMs and agentic systems. VideoAgent achieves 87-95% orchestration success rates while reducing API costs by 60%. Human evaluation across six video categories shows VideoAgent produces professional-quality content approaching human-level performance, with ratings only 4% below human-created videos. We release our code at https://github.com/HKUDS/VideoAgent.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Convergence analysis of the Riemannian proximal gradient method with inexact oracle

We extend the notion of an inexact first-order oracle from the Euclidean setting to Riemannian optimization, and conduct a convergence analysis for the Riemannian proximal gradient method equipped with this oracle, which we refer to as RPG-IO. Under mild conditions on the oracle errors, we establish the global convergence of RPG-IO. Specifically, we prove that (i) the norm of the search direction converges to zero; (ii) the sequence of function values converges to the function value at any accumulation point of the iterates; and (iii) every accumulation point of the iterates is a stationary point. Under the additional assumption of the Riemannian Kurdyka--Łojasiewicz (KL) property, we prove that the full sequence of iterates generated by RPG-IO converges to a single stationary point. Moreover, we derive explicit convergence rates when the KL exponent is specified. Finally, when a strong inexact oracle is employed, we establish the convergence rate of the sequence of function values to the optimal value.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

AOHP: An Open-Source OS-Level Agent Harness for Personalized, Efficient and Secure Interaction

AI agents are driving a new software paradigm, with the ability to autonomously call tools, extract information, manage memory, and complete tasks that span applications and data sources. Most existing end-user operating systems, however, are designed for application-centric workflows and offer little native support for AI agents. This mismatch limits the wider adoption of agents and leads to execution overhead and safety risks when running agents on conventional systems. While the concept of agent-native operating systems is emerging, the research community lacks an open testbed to explore the architectural primitives desired for agent-mediated interaction. We present AOHP (Android Open Harness Project), an OS-level agent harness built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The core design principle of AOHP is to treat agents as first-class OS actors, enabling adaptive user interfaces and agent-friendly runtime environments. AOHP preserves the mature Android software and hardware ecosystem while introducing three agent-oriented system mechanisms: personalized service composition, efficient agent interfaces, and secure information flow. Based on preliminary experiments on challenging tasks covering key capabilities of OS agents, AOHP shows clear advantages in task completion (+21.12% completion rate), execution cost (-51.55% token cost), and security-policy compliance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SPDA-SAM: A Self-prompted Depth-Aware Segment Anything Model for Instance Segmentation

Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong generalizability in various instance segmentation tasks. However, its performance is severely dependent on the quality of manual prompts. In addition, the RGB images that instance segmentation methods normally use inherently lack depth information. As a result, the ability of these methods to perceive spatial structures and delineate object boundaries is hindered. To address these challenges, we propose a Self-prompted Depth-Aware SAM (SPDA-SAM) for instance segmentation. Specifically, we design a Semantic-Spatial Self-prompt Module (SSSPM) which extracts the semantic and spatial prompts from the image encoder and the mask decoder of SAM, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine RGB-D Fusion Module (C2FFM), in which the features extracted from a monocular RGB image and the depth map estimated from it are fused. In particular, the structural information in the depth map is used to provide coarse-grained guidance to feature fusion, while local variations in depth are encoded in order to fuse fine-grained feature representations. To our knowledge, SAM has not been explored in such self-prompted and depth-aware manners. Experimental results demonstrate that our SPDA-SAM outperforms its state-of-the-art counterparts across twelve different data sets. These promising results should be due to the guidance of the self-prompts and the compensation for the spatial information loss by the coarse-to-fine RGB-D fusion operation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Who Deserves the Reward? SHARP: Shapley Credit-based Optimization for Multi-Agent System

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via multi-agent systems offers a promising new paradigm for decomposing and solving complex problems. However, training these systems remains notoriously difficult due to the credit assignment challenge, as it is often unclear which specific functional agent is responsible for the success or failure of decision trajectories. Existing methods typically rely on sparse or globally broadcast rewards, failing to capture individual contributions and leading to inefficient reinforcement learning. To address these limitations, we introduce the Shapley-based Hierarchical Attribution for Reinforcement Policy (SHARP), a novel framework for optimizing multi-agent reinforcement learning via precise credit attribution. SHARP effectively stabilizes training by normalizing agent-specific advantages across trajectory groups, primarily through a decomposed reward mechanism comprising a global broadcast-accuracy reward, a Shapley-based marginal-credit reward for each agent, and a tool-process reward to improve execution efficiency. Extensive experiments across various real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SHARP significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines, achieving average match improvements of 23.66% and 14.05% over single-agent and multi-agent approaches, respectively.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

CLI-Anything: Towards Agent-Native Computer Use

As large language models advance in reasoning and tool use capabilities, researchers increasingly seek to leverage them for computer use agents that can interact with existing software. The dominant approach develops GUI agents that control applications through visual interfaces: interpreting screenshots, locating UI elements, and executing mouse clicks to mimic human interaction. This GUI-centric paradigm fundamentally misaligns with agent capabilities. Current GUI agents struggle with brittle pixel-level interactions, timing dependencies, and coordinate-based actions that break with interface changes. They force agents to emulate human perceptual limitations rather than leverage their computational strengths in structured data processing and programmatic control. CLI-Anything argues for agent-native computer use design. Instead of forcing agents to navigate visual layouts, we create interfaces aligned with how agents naturally operate: through structured commands, explicit state representations, and deterministic feedback. We transform existing applications into command-line harnesses that preserve functionality while exposing machine-readable protocols optimized for AI-native interaction. This eliminates the lossy visual-to-computational translation that plagues GUI agents. Rather than building sophisticated screen readers and click simulators, we should redesign interaction paradigms around agent strengths: precise programmatic control and deterministic execution. We examine the methodology, architecture, evidence, and future directions for this agent-native transformation of computer use. We have built CLI-Hub as a comprehensive platform that operationalizes this agent-native computer use vision. The platform provides methodology, architecture, and infrastructure for this fundamental transformation of computer use.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

UltraCUA: A Foundation Model for Computer Use Agents with Hybrid Action

Computer-use agents face a fundamental limitation. They rely exclusively on primitive GUI actions (click, type, scroll), creating brittle execution chains prone to cascading failures. While API-driven agents harness rich capabilities through structured interfaces and tools, computer-use agents remain constrained to low-level visual interactions. We present UltraCUA, a foundation model that transcends this limitation through hybrid action-seamlessly unifying primitive GUI operations with high-level tool execution. Our innovation rests on four critical advances. First, an automated pipeline extracts and scales tool capabilities from software documentation and code repositories. Second, a synthetic data engine produces 17,000+ verifiable tasks capturing real-world computer-use complexity. Third, comprehensive hybrid action trajectory collection incorporates both GUI primitives and strategic tool calls. Fourth, a two-stage training methodology combines supervised fine-tuning with online reinforcement learning, enabling intelligent action selection between GUI and API. Evaluation with our 7B and 32B UltraCUA models reveals transformative performance gains. On OSWorld, UltraCUA achieves 22% relative improvement while executing 11% faster than existing approaches, averagely. Cross-domain validation on WindowsAgentArena demonstrates robust generalization with 21.7% success rate, surpassing Windows-trained baselines. The hybrid action paradigm proves essential, reducing error propagation while improving execution efficiency. This work establishes a scalable paradigm bridging primitive GUI interactions and high-level tool intelligence, enabling more resilient and adaptable computer use agents for diverse environments and complex real-world tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

LightReasoner: Can Small Language Models Teach Large Language Models Reasoning?

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, often through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, SFT is resource-intensive, relying on large curated datasets, rejection-sampled demonstrations, and uniform optimization across all tokens, even though only a fraction carry meaningful learning value. In this work, we explore a counterintuitive idea: can smaller language models (SLMs) teach larger language models (LLMs) by revealing high-value reasoning moments that reflect the latter's unique strength? We propose LightReasoner, a novel framework that leverages the behavioral divergence between a stronger expert model (LLM) and a weaker amateur model (SLM). LightReasoner operates in two stages: (1) a sampling stage that pinpoints critical reasoning moments and constructs supervision examples capturing the expert's advantage through expert-amateur contrast, and (2) a fine-tuning stage that aligns the expert model with these distilled examples, amplifying its reasoning strengths. Across seven mathematical benchmarks, LightReasoner improves accuracy by up to 28.1%, while reducing time consumption by 90%, sampled problems by 80%, and tuned token usage by 99%, all without relying on ground-truth labels. By turning weaker SLMs into effective teaching signals, LightReasoner offers a scalable and resource-efficient approach for advancing LLM reasoning. Code is available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/LightReasoner

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Revisiting a Pain in the Neck: A Semantic Reasoning Benchmark for Language Models

We present SemanticQA, an evaluation suite designed to assess language models (LMs) in semantic phrase processing tasks. The benchmark consolidates existing multiword expression (MwE) resources and reorganizes them into a unified testbed. It covers both general lexical phenomena, such as lexical collocations, and three fine-grained categories: idiomatic expressions, noun compounds, and verbal constructions. Through SemanticQA, we assess LMs of diverse architectures and scales in extraction, classification, and interpretation tasks, as well as sequential task compositions. We reveal substantial performance variation, particularly on tasks requiring semantic reasoning, highlighting differences in reasoning efficacy and semantic understanding of LMs, providing insights for pushing LMs with stronger comprehension on non-trivial semantic phrases. The evaluation harness and data of SemanticQA are available at https://github.com/jacklanda/SemanticQA.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Safactory: A Scalable Agentic Infrastructure for Training Trustworthy Autonomous Intelligence

As large models evolve from conversational assistants into autonomous agents, challenges increasingly arise from long-horizon decision making, tool use, and real environment interaction. Existing agenticinfrastructure remain fragmented across evaluation, data management, and agent evolution, making it difficult to discover risks systematically and improve models in a continuous closed loop. In this report, we present \textbf{Safactory}, a scalable agent factory for trustworthy autonomous intelligence. Safactory integrates three tightly coupled platforms: a \textbf{Parallel Simulation Platform} for trajectory generation, a \textbf{Trustworthy Data Platform} for trajectory storage and experience extraction, and an \textbf{Autonomous Evolution Platform} for asynchronous reinforcement learning and on-policy distillation. As far as we know, Safactory is the first framework to propose a unified evolutionary pipeline for next-generation trustworthy autonomous intelligence.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Efficient Data Selection for Multimodal Models via Incremental Optimization Utility

The scaling of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) is constrained by the quality-quantity trade-off inherent in synthetic data. Previous approaches, such as LLM-as-a-Judge, have proven their effectiveness in addressing this but suffer from prohibitive computational costs and lack of interpretability. To bridge this gap, we propose One-Step-Train (OST), a framework that reformulates data selection as an incremental optimization utility ranking problem. Instead of relying on semantic heuristics, OST estimates the marginal utility of each sample via a simulated single-step update on a lightweight proxy. Experiments on the Qwen series across multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that OST achieves Pareto-optimal efficiency. By selecting the top-50 subset, OST reduces training costs by 43% (and total time consumption by 17) while surpassing the strong LLM-as-a-Judge baseline by 1.8 points. Furthermore, under a fixed compute budget, our method using only the top-20 subset achieves a 5.6 point gain over LLM-as-a-Judge, improves upon heuristic scoring baselines like DEITA, and outperforms the Full-SFT baseline by 8.8 points. Notably, while Full-SFT suffers from performance degradation due to noise, our optimization-grounded approach effectively identifies toxic samples, successfully reversing the negative transfer frequently observed in complex reasoning tasks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

DRIFT: Transferring Reasoning Priors for Efficient MLLM Fine-Tuning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress, yet their reasoning ability often lags behind strong text-only LLMs. Bridging this gap typically requires large-scale multimodal reasoning data or reinforcement learning, incurring substantial cost. An appealing alternative is parameter-space model merging between reasoning-enhanced LLMs and MLLMs, but we show that naive merging is fragile: its effectiveness varies widely across model families and can significantly degrade performance (e.g., for Qwen-based MLLMs). We propose Directional Reasoning Injection for Fine-Tuning (DRIFT), a lightweight method that transfers reasoning knowledge in the gradient space while preserving multimodal alignment. DRIFT precomputes a reasoning prior from the parameter differences between text-only reasoning experts and multimodal models, and uses it to bias gradients during supervised fine-tuning. This design retains the simplicity of standard SFT pipelines while enabling efficient and stable reasoning transfer. Experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, including MathVista and MathVerse, show that DRIFT consistently outperforms naive merging and standard SFT, and matches or surpasses training-intensive methods with substantially lower data and compute.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SVOM/VT: Flight Model Verification and Pre-launch Testing

This paper presents pre-launch testing and calibration results for the SVOM/VT (Space-based Variable Objects Monitor, Visible Telescope) Flight Model (FM), validating its performance under simulated space conditions through thermal vacuum cycling, energy concentration analysis, stray light suppression, and CCD/electronics calibrations (gain, noise, quantum efficiency). The results confirm full compliance with design requirements: stray light suppression achieves point-source transmittance $<10^{-7}$ at $30^\circ$ off-axis, thermal control maintains stable CCD temperatures ($-75^\circ$C for the red channel, $-65^\circ$C for the blue channel), and detection sensitivity meets the limiting magnitude of 22.50 (SNR $>$ 3 with 300 seconds exposure). Early in-orbit tests further validate performance, yielding limiting magnitudes of 22.70 (V-band, red) and 22.78 (blue), consistent with pre-launch specifications.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2026

Retinex Meets Language: A Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network

Underwater images often suffer from severe degradation caused by light absorption and scattering, leading to color distortion, low contrast and reduced visibility. Existing Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) methods can be divided into two categories, i.e., prior-based and learning-based methods. The former rely on rigid physical assumptions that limit the adaptability, while the latter often face data scarcity and weak generalization. To address these issues, we propose a Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network (PSG-UIENet), which couples the Retinex-grounded illumination correction with the language-informed guidance. This network comprises a Prior-Free Illumination Estimator and a Semantics-Guided Image Restorer. In particular, the restorer leverages the textual descriptions generated by the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to inject high-level semantics for perceptually meaningful guidance. Since multimodal UIE data sets are not publicly available, we also construct a large-scale image-text UIE data set, namely, LUIQD-TD, which contains 6,418 image-reference-text triplets. To explicitly measure and optimize semantic consistency between textual descriptions and images, we further design an Image-Text Semantic Similarity (ITSS) loss function. To our knowledge, this study makes the first effort to introduce both textual guidance and the multimodal data set into UIE tasks. Extensive experiments on our data set and four publicly available data sets demonstrate that the proposed PSG-UIENet achieves superior or comparable performance against fifteen state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗