arXiv subjects

Zhaofeng He

Publications and source records attributed to Zhaofeng He.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Trusting Imagined Futures: Auditing Imagined Rewards for VLA Post-Training

Video world models enable candidate actions to be evaluated through imagined outcomes, but high predicted rewards can favor trajectories with poor execution quality. We introduce Trusting Imagined Futures (TIF), an offline supervision selection method for vision-language-action (VLA) post-training that audits predicted rewards using execution feedback. A multidimensional reward model predicts a utility score for candidate ranking and five dimensions of execution quality. An auditor uses reward predictions and uncertainty to identify overestimation patterns learned from paired imagined videos and real executions. TIF accepts the candidate with the highest predicted utility when its advantage over the existing trajectory exceeds a margin and its audit risk passes a threshold; otherwise, it retains the existing supervision. The retained real trajectories then supervise behavior cloning. Across four LIBERO suites and three training seeds, TIF achieves a mean success rate of 76.25%, improving over training on the existing trajectories by 3.00 percentage points with the same trajectory count and training budget. Adding audit gating yields 1.47 percentage points with the reward model and advantage margin held fixed. The gains persist against advantage ranking and logistic regression risk selection at matched replacement counts. On recorded videos from three real robot tasks, TIF increases clean completion among selected trajectories from 58.33% to 70.00% across 60 candidate pools.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

MemeLogos: Knowledge-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Harmful Meme Detection

With the rapid proliferation of social media, harmful memes have become a growing threat to online ecosystems. Their harmfulness is often implicitly conveyed through complex interactions among visual, textual, and contextual cues, making accurate detection challenging. Recent studies have introduced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and external knowledge into harmful meme detection. However, existing methods mainly retrieve similar instances or auxiliary information, limiting their ability to capture reusable harmfulness knowledge and underlying reasoning mechanisms, and thus constraining both detection performance and interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose MemeLogos, a knowledge-driven retrieval-augmented reasoning framework for harmful meme detection. MemeLogos abstracts recurring harmfulness patterns and reasoning structures from diverse harmful cases into reusable knowledge units and organizes them into a dedicated star-shaped knowledge graph. By combining structured knowledge retrieval with an explicit multi-stage reasoning process inspired by cognitive mechanisms, MemeLogos leverages retrieved knowledge to guide harmfulness reasoning, improving both detection reliability and interpretability. Extensive experiments show that MemeLogos consistently outperforms existing harmful meme detection methods while generating more coherent and interpretable reasoning, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured harmfulness knowledge for multimodal content understanding.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

FARL: A Fully Automated Pipeline of RL Interface and Solver Design

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) largely focuses on optimizing learning algorithms within a pre-defined task formulation, while applying RL to new tasks still relies heavily on human expertise to design the learning pipeline: what an agent observes, how it is rewarded, which algorithm it uses, and how training is configured. Automating these choices is challenging because they are tightly coupled. We introduce FARL (Fully Automated Reinforcement Learning), a framework that automates RL design by jointly searching observation and reward programs, learning algorithms, and training settings. FARL uses training statistics and observed behavior to diagnose failures, propose changes, and test whether they improve learning. Its search preserves diverse candidates and the controls needed for these tests, using a staged budget to screen designs before investing in longer training. Experimental memory records each finding together with its conditions, so an unsuccessful component can be reconsidered in a different combination. Across expert-withheld and expert-available settings, FARL outperforms the evaluated automated baselines on challenging navigation, locomotion, and manipulation tasks. On Adroit Hand Relocate, FARL achieves 97.1% success at 5M training steps per policy, compared with 0% for Eureka and LiMEN and 1.0% for native Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) under the same policy training budget.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

A*-Thought-V2: Efficient Latent Reasoning via Geometric Dynamics of LLM

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) but incurs substantial computation and context costs. Existing methods either lose intermediate information through hard pruning or lack a principled criterion for continuous compression. We present A*-Thought-V2, a geometric dynamics of LLM guided framework that models CoT as a hidden-state trajectory and replaces hard deletion with an explicit-implicit interleaved latent architecture. After projecting question, step, and solution representations into a 3D PCA space, it measures alignment between each local transition and global question-to-solution direction. Aligned steps remain explicit text, whereas deviating steps are compressed into continuous latent tokens. Directional angles capture both local semantics and reasoning dynamics: small angles indicate direct execution and answer formation, while large angles more frequently involve checking, correction, and branch exploration; their temporal variation reveals exploration, convergence, and refinement stages. To train this architecture, we introduce stepwise embedding forcing, which pools each redundant step into a single latent embedding, and label forcing, which supervises that latent token with a soft multi-modal vocabulary distribution instead of a hard one-hot label. Experiments on Qwen3.5-9B and Qwen3.6-27B across six in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks show that A*-Thought-V2 improves average accuracy by up to 2.6% while reducing response length by up to half, increasing Accuracy per Computation Unit by 2.29$\times$, and reducing preprocessing and training time by 94.6% and up to 80.3%, respectively. Representation analyses suggest that latent states form a compact region distinct from textual states, while higher entropy at latent-token positions reflects broader soft targets that encourage richer step-level feature learning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Make an Offer They Can't Refuse: Grounding Bayesian Persuasion in Real-World Dialogues without Pre-Commitment

Large language models (LLMs) still struggle with strategic persuasion, largely because existing approaches either neglect information asymmetry or rely on unrealistic pre-commitment assumptions. We introduce a type-induced commitment-communication mechanism that grounds Bayesian Persuasion (BP) in natural language dialogue without pre-commitment: the persuader narrates their potential types (e.g., honest vs. dishonest) to dynamically construct an information schema, enabling the persuadee to perform Bayesian belief updates within the conversation itself. We implement two variants: Semi-Formal-Natural-Language (SFNL) and Fully-Natural-Language (FNL), evaluating them against strong baselines across multiple LLMs and human judges. BP strategies consistently outperform baselines: SFNL excels in logical credibility, while FNL shows superior robustness and emotional resonance. We verify that gains stem from genuine Bayesian reasoning rather than superficial formatting, and we further show that supervised fine-tuning enables small models to match the persuasive performance of much larger ones.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

From Recognition to Reasoning: Advancing Multimodal Harmful Meme Detection via Chain-of-Thought Alignment

As a multimodal communication medium that integrates images and text, memes often convey implicit harmful content through metaphors, satire, and humor, making harmful meme detection a complex and challenging task. Although recent studies have achieved considerable progress in detection accuracy and model interpretability, large-scale, high-quality datasets for harmful memes remain scarce. Moreover, existing methods still exhibit notable limitations in identifying implicit risks and understanding fine-grained semantics. To address these challenges, we construct MemeMind, a large-scale dataset for harmful meme detection. MemeMind comprises a broad collection of publicly available memes and adopts a rigorous and comprehensive taxonomy of harmful content developed in accordance with widely recognized international standards and contemporary Internet contexts. In addition, the dataset provides detailed structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning annotations to support fine-grained analysis of harmfulness, implicit intentions, and underlying semantics in memes. Building upon MemeMind, we further propose MemeGuard, a reasoning-oriented multimodal framework for harmful meme detection. MemeGuard employs a three-stage training strategy to progressively enhance the model's visual understanding, multimodal reasoning, and harmful content discrimination capabilities, thereby improving both detection accuracy and the interpretability of model decisions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MemeGuard outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the MemeMind dataset, providing a solid foundation for future research on harmful meme detection and multimodal content safety.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

HarnessSafe: Evaluating Safety Across Persistent Carriers in Agent Harnesses

Modern agent harnesses persist state across tasks and sessions through persistent carriers like memory, skills, tools, and shared artifacts. However, this capability creates delayed safety risks: attacker-influenced content can cross system boundaries and later affect the execution of a benign request. Existing benchmarks typically focus on a few carriers or harnesses, while end-to-end attack-success rates reveal little about how risks propagate. To this end, we present HarnessSafe, a benchmark comprising 328 executable cases across seven persistent-carrier families and evaluated on most mainstream agent harnesses. Each case is specified as a Persistent-Risk Lifecycle that traces attacker influence from its initial entry, through persistence across carriers and system boundaries, to a later benign trigger and an observable violation. We further introduce a multi-stage, trace-based evaluation that uses observable execution evidence to determine how far each attack chain progresses and where it is stopped. Experiments show that containment is carrier-specific and strongly depends on the harness-model configuration. Both the harness and model backend substantially shape containment outcomes, while attack success rates cannot reflect distinct lifecycle progression patterns.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Never compromise with vulnerabilities: a comprehensive survey on AI governance

The rapid advancement of AI has expanded its capabilities across domains, yet introduced critical technical vulnerabilities, such as algorithmic bias and adversarial sensitivity, that pose significant societal risks, including misinformation, inequity, security breaches, physical harm, and eroded public trust. These challenges highlight the urgent need for robust AI governance. We propose a comprehensive framework integrating technical and societal dimensions, structured around three interconnected pillars: Intrinsic Security (system reliability), Derivative Security (real-world harm mitigation), and Social Ethics (value alignment and accountability). Uniquely, our approach unifies technical methods, emerging evaluation benchmarks, and policy insights to promote transparency, accountability, and trust in AI systems. Through a systematic review of over 300 studies, we identify three core challenges: (1) the generalization gap, where defenses fail against evolving threats; (2) inadequate evaluation protocols that overlook real-world risks; and (3) fragmented regulations leading to inconsistent oversight. These shortcomings stem from treating governance as an afterthought, rather than a foundational design principle, resulting in reactive, siloed efforts that fail to address the interdependence of technical integrity and societal trust. To overcome this, we present an integrated research agenda that bridges technical rigor with social responsibility. Our framework offers actionable guidance for researchers, engineers, and policymakers to develop AI systems that are not only robust and secure but also ethically aligned and publicly trustworthy. The accompanying repository is available at https://github.com/Tele-EVOL/AI-Governance.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

SAGA: Scene-Aware, Goal-Evolving Agents for Long-Horizon Strategy Game Planning

Grand-strategy games such as Civilization pose a distinctive long-horizon planning problem: an agent must divide one shared resource pool among six competing domains -- technology, government, diplomacy, city development, expansion, and military -- under partial observability, with no feedback except a delayed final score. Current LLM agents fall short in three ways: 1) they cannot infer spatial relations from raw coordinates; 2) they allocate resources poorly, because feeding the entire growing state into one prompt and planning all domains in a single output diffuses attention and biases decisions toward urgent events; and 3) they cannot improve, as the delayed score gives no signal within or across games. We present SAGA, an LLM multi-agent framework pairing one mechanism with each weakness: (i) a Map-Semantic Scene Graph turning coordinates into per-entity statements of distance, direction, and threat; (ii) a Tool-Augmented Planner that retrieves only the state a decision needs, cutting the order of magnitude of its input, and issues a separate plan per domain to six specialist controllers, so urgent events do not derail long-term plans; and (iii) a Dual-Horizon Feedback Loop setting short-term goals during play and distilling each game into lessons for the next. On CivRealm, a Civilization-style benchmark, SAGA leads five LLM baselines on mean final score and is the only method significantly ahead of all of them on city development, the first investment baselines sacrifice, with 27% fewer output tokens; with cross-game learning it scores highest after five games, and its fifth game consistently surpasses its first across four maps. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kazecloudk/SAGA-Scene-Aware-Goal-Evolving-Agents-for-Long-Horizon-Strategy-Game-Planning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Sequential Interaction: Benchmarking Parallel Execution and Coordination for GUI Agents

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents are systems powered by large multimodal models (LMMs). They perceive screen state and execute user instructions through GUI actions such as clicking, typing, and scrolling on desktops and mobile devices. However, current agents scale poorly to long-horizon tasks: actions incur costly LMM inferences, and performance degrades as context grows. Humans divide such workloads among collaborators who complete sub-tasks in parallel. Yet parallel coordination among GUI agents has received little attention. To close this gap, we introduce ParaGUIBench, to our knowledge, the first benchmark dedicated to parallel execution and coordination of multiple GUI agents on separate desktop instances. It consists of three components: a multi-device Docker infrastructure with a shared file system; a dataset of 233 tasks spanning six task categories; and an evaluation system with efficiency metrics, including step reduction ratio and token cost. We further introduce ParaGUI, a planner-worker agent that decomposes GUI tasks and dispatches sub-tasks to concurrent workers on separate desktop instances. On ParaGUIBench, ParaGUI reaches a 46.4% success rate, outperforming the strongest serial baseline (Claude Sonnet 4.6) by 12.9 points while using roughly half the steps and less than half the tokens. These results show that parallel execution can improve both success rate and efficiency on decomposable, long-horizon GUI tasks, pointing to a direction worth further study.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SafeRelBench: A Spatial-Relation-Aware Benchmark for Process-Level Safety in VLM-Driven Embodied Agents

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as the reasoning backbone of embodied agents, enabling robots to interpret visual scenes, follow language instructions, and plan multi-step actions. In household environments, however, safety depends not only on recognizing objects, but also on how actions change the physical scene over time. Existing embodied safety evaluations largely focus on static risk recognition, unsafe instruction refusal, or final-state task completion. As a result, process-level safety failures induced by spatial relations such as support, containment, and proximity remain insufficiently studied. To address this gap, we introduce SAFERELBENCH, a spatial-relation-aware safety benchmark with 507 executable evaluation samples, including 248 spatial-relation samples and 259 non-spatial control samples. Using SAFERELBENCH to evaluate seven open- and closed-source VLM-driven embodied agents, we find a substantial gap between task success and process-level safety compliance: models often complete the requested task while violating process-level safety constraints. Unlike prior benchmarks, SAFERELBENCH explicitly tests whether agents satisfy safety conditions before risk-prone actions, making spatial relations a core dimension in embodied safety assessment. More broadly, our results show that safe embodied intelligence requires not only stronger perception and planning, but also reliable reasoning about how object relations shape risk during interaction.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Omni-RRM: Advancing Omni Reward Modeling via Automatic Rubric-Grounded Preference Synthesis

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with alignment due to the limitations of existing reward models (RMs), which are predominantly vision-centric, dependent on costly human labels, and provide opaque scalar scores that fail to capture nuanced reasoning, leading to brittle alignment. We present Omni-RRM, an \textbf{Omni}-modal \textbf{R}ubric-grounded \textbf{R}eward \textbf{M}odel that generates multi-dimensional reward signals across text, image, video, and audio. To overcome the high cost and inherent inconsistency of human-centric evaluation in multi-dimensional reasoning, we introduce \textbf{Omni-Preference}, a high-quality dataset constructed via automatic rubric-grounded preference synthesis. In this pipeline, teacher models reconcile raw preferences into explicit justifications, ensuring that the synthesized supervision is both high-fidelity and interpretable. Omni-RRM is trained using a progressive SFT + GRPO regimen, specifically optimized to sharpen reward discrimination on low-margin, hard preference pairs. It achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on video (80.2\% on ShareGPT-Video) and audio benchmarks (66.8\% on Audio-HH-RLHF and 65.0\% on TA2T), yielding a five-benchmark Overall accuracy of 70.4\% and a +17.0\% relative gain over its backbone. Furthermore, Omni-RRM effectively guides Best-of-$N$ selection and exhibits robust transfer to text-only alignment. All resources, including the dataset, training and inference code, and model checkpoints are available at https://tmfk418.github.io/Omni-RRM.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

AirGroundBench: Probing Spatial Intelligence in Multimodal Large Models under Heterogeneous Multi-View Embodied Collaboration

In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for embodied intelligence, yet their ability to maintain geometrically consistent spatial understanding across heterogeneous views remains under-evaluated. Existing benchmarks largely focus on single-agent, single-view perception, leaving a gap in the systematic assessment of collaborative air-ground settings, where multi-scale observations are complementary but introduce scale mismatch, asymmetric occlusion, and reference-frame inconsistencies. We present AirGroundBench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating multi-view spatial intelligence in heterogeneous UAV-UGV collaboration. AirGroundBench is built from 11 high-fidelity simulated environments with 1,021 synchronized air-ground observation pairs, yielding approximately 62,000 dual-view, four-option single-choice visual question answering instances and 115 closed-loop vision-language navigation episodes. It covers 10 task types organized into four progressively demanding capability dimensions: spatial perception, cross-view alignment, spatial transformation and reasoning, and embodied decision-making. To support geometry-grounded evaluation and analysis, we provide structured spatial annotations, including cross-view object identities and metric 2D and 3D bounding boxes. Evaluations of 13 representative MLLMs under UAV-only, UGV-only, and dual-view input settings reveal consistent bottlenecks: models perform relatively well on spatial perception but struggle with cross-view alignment and transformation-intensive reasoning, and these deficits propagate to sequential decision-making in vision-language navigation. Although dual-view inputs provide measurable gains over single-view variants, a persistent gap from human performance remains, highlighting geometric consistency as a key limitation of current embodied MLLMs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Harnessing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models for Face Anti-Spoofing

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) typically depends on a single visual modality when defending against presentation attacks such as print attacks, screen replays, and 3D masks, resulting in limited generalization across devices, environments, and attack types. Meanwhile, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved breakthroughs in image-text understanding and semantic reasoning, suggesting that integrating visual and linguistic co-inference into FAS can substantially improve both robustness and interpretability. However, the lack of a high-quality vision-language multimodal dataset has been a critical bottleneck. To address this, we introduce FaceCoT (Face Chain-of-Thought), the first large-scale Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset tailored for FAS. FaceCoT covers 14 spoofing attack types and enriches model learning with high-quality CoT VQA annotations. Meanwhile, we develop a caption model refined via reinforcement learning to expand the dataset and enhance annotation quality. Furthermore, we introduce a CoT-Enhanced Progressive Learning (CEPL) strategy to better leverage the CoT data and boost model performance on FAS tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained with FaceCoT and CEPL outperform state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmark datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

GUI Knowledge Bench: Revealing the Knowledge Gap of VLMs in GUI Tasks

Vision language models (VLMs) have advanced graphical user interface (GUI) task automation but still lag behind humans. We hypothesize this gap stems from missing core GUI knowledge, which existing training schemes (such as supervised fine tuning and reinforcement learning) alone cannot fully address. By analyzing common failure patterns in GUI task execution, we distill GUI knowledge into three dimensions: (1) interface knowledge about widget functions, layout semantics, and system states; (2) interaction knowledge about GUI interaction types and effects; and (3) procedure knowledge of task objectives and workflow sequences. We further introduce GUI Knowledge Bench, a benchmark with multiple-choice and yes/no questions across six platforms (Web, Android, MacOS, Windows, Linux, IOS) and 292 applications. Our evaluation indicates that current VLMs are generally aware of the functions of individual widgets, but lack the GUI-specific knowledge required to track system states, adhere to GUI interaction conventions, and assess task completion progress. Experiments on real-world GUI tasks further validate the close link between GUI knowledge and task success. By providing a structured framework for assessing GUI knowledge, our work supports the selection of VLMs with greater potential prior to downstream training and provides insights for building more capable GUI agents.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Face Swapping: A Diffusion-Based Digital Human Benchmark for Multimodal Deepfake Detection

In recent years, the explosive advancement of deepfake technology has posed a critical and escalating threat to public security: diffusion-based digital human generation. Unlike traditional face manipulation methods, such models can generate highly realistic videos with consistency via multimodal control signals. Their flexibility and covertness pose severe challenges to existing detection strategies. To bridge this gap, we introduce DigiFakeAV, the new large-scale multimodal digital human forgery dataset based on diffusion models. Leveraging five of the latest digital human generation methods and a voice cloning method, we systematically construct a dataset comprising 60,000 videos (8.4 million frames), covering multiple nationalities, skin tones, genders, and real-world scenarios, significantly enhancing data diversity and realism. User studies demonstrate that the misrecognition rate by participants for DigiFakeAV reaches as high as 68%. Moreover, the substantial performance degradation of existing detection models on our dataset further highlights its challenges. To address this problem, we propose DigiShield, an effective detection baseline based on spatiotemporal and cross-modal fusion. By jointly modeling the 3D spatiotemporal features of videos and the semantic-acoustic features of audio, DigiShield achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the DigiFakeAV and shows strong generalization on other datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

S$^3$-Attention:Attention-Aligned Endogenous Retrieval for Memory-Bounded Long-Context Inference

Large language models are increasingly applied to multi-document and long-form inputs, yet long-context inference remains memory- and noise-inefficient. Key-value (KV) caching scales linearly with context length, while external retrieval methods often return lexically similar but causally irrelevant passages. We present S3-Attention, a memory-first inference-time framework that treats long-context processing as attention-aligned endogenous retrieval. S3-Attention decodes transient key and query projections into top-k sparse feature identifiers using lightweight sparse autoencoders, and constructs a CPU-based inverted index mapping features to token positions or spans during a single streaming scan. This design allows the KV cache to be discarded entirely and bounds GPU memory usage by the scan chunk size. At generation time, feature co-activation is used to retrieve compact evidence spans, optionally fused with BM25 for exact lexical matching. Under a unified LongBench evaluation protocol with fixed prompting, decoding, and matched token budgets, S3-Hybrid closely matches full-context inference across multiple model families and improves robustness in several information-dense settings. We also report an engineering limitation of the current prototype, which incurs higher wall-clock latency than optimized full-KV baselines, motivating future kernel-level optimization.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Interpretable Safety Alignment via SAE-Constructed Low-Rank Subspace Adaptation

Safety alignment -- training large language models (LLMs) to refuse harmful requests while remaining helpful -- is critical for responsible deployment. Prior work established that safety behaviors are governed by low-rank structures, suggesting parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) should be well-suited for alignment. However, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) consistently underperforms full fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on safety benchmarks. We attribute this gap to semantic entanglement: safety-relevant directions are intertwined with unrelated concepts due to polysemanticity, impeding implicit subspace identification. To address this, we propose SAILS (Safety Alignment via Interpretable Low-rank Subspace), which leverages Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to disentangle representations into monosemantic features, constructs an interpretable safety subspace from SAE decoder directions, and uses it to initialize LoRA adapters. Theoretically, we prove that SAE-based identification achieves arbitrarily small recovery error under monosemanticity assumptions, while direct identification suffers an irreducible error floor. Empirically, SAILS achieves up to 99.6% safety rate on Gemma-2-9B -- exceeding full fine-tuning by 7.4 points and matching RLHF-based models -- while updating only 0.19% of parameters and providing interpretability.

cs.CL↗