Abstract:Deep Research Agents have shown strong capability in multi-step information retrieval, reasoning, and long-form report generation, but existing benchmarks and systems remain predominantly text-centric, with limited evaluation of whether visual elements are factually reliable and well aligned with the surrounding analysis. To address this gap, we introduce TVIR (Text--Visual Interleaved Report Generation), which includes TVIR-Bench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated multimodal deep research tasks that require visual elements to serve specific analytical sub-goals, and TVIR-Agent, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that serves as a strong baseline for constructing outlines, retrieving images, generating charts with traceable sources, and composing reports through context-aware sequential writing. We further develop a dual-path evaluation framework that combines Textual Assessment and Visual Assessment. Experiments across nine deep research systems show that TVIR-Agent achieves strong overall performance, underscoring the importance of explicit multimodal design and evaluation for evidence-driven report generation.
Abstract:Deep-research agents solve tasks through long trajectories of search, tool use, evidence inspection, and answer synthesis. Evaluation based on final answers shows whether an agent succeeds, but not which parts of the trajectory make the answer unreliable. We study span-level error localization for deep-research agents. We collect 2,790 real trajectories from two agent frameworks, three backbone models, and three benchmarks, convert raw logs into semantic spans, and annotate harmful error spans through LLM-assisted expert review. From these annotations, we build TELBench, a 1,000-instance benchmark for identifying error spans among normal exploration, failed searches, tentative hypotheses, and harmless noise. We further propose DRIFT, a claim-centric auditing framework that tracks agent claims, checks their support in trajectory evidence, and marks spans where unsupported or conflicting claims affect the answer path. Experiments across model families and auditing frameworks show that DRIFT improves span-level error localization and first-error accuracy by up to 30 percentage points. Our work provides a process-level view of reliability in deep-research agents.
Abstract:Deep Research Agents (DRAs) aim to solve complex, long-horizon research tasks involving planning, retrieval, multimodal understanding, and report generation, yet their evaluation remains challenging due to dynamic web environments and ambiguous task definitions. We propose DR$^{3}$-Eval, a realistic and reproducible benchmark for evaluating deep research agents on multimodal, multi-file report generation. DR$^{3}$-Eval is constructed from authentic user-provided materials and paired with a per-task static research sandbox corpus that simulates open-web complexity while remaining fully verifiable, containing supportive documents, distractors, and noise. Moreover, we introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation framework measuring Information Recall, Factual Accuracy, Citation Coverage, Instruction Following, and Depth Quality, and validate its alignment with human judgments. Experiments with our developed multi-agent system DR$^{3}$-Agent based on multiple state-of-the-art language models demonstrate that DR$^{3}$-Eval is highly challenging and reveals critical failure modes in retrieval robustness and hallucination control. Our code and data are publicly available.
Abstract:Textual adversarial attacks pose a serious security threat to Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems by introducing imperceptible perturbations that mislead deep learning models. While adversarial example detection offers a lightweight alternative to robust training, existing methods typically rely on prior knowledge of attacks, white-box access to the victim model, or numerous queries, which severely limits their practical deployment. This paper introduces RTD-Guard, a novel black-box framework for detecting textual adversarial examples. Our key insight is that word-substitution perturbations in adversarial attacks closely resemble the "replaced tokens" that a Replaced Token Detection (RTD) discriminator is pre-trained to identify. Leveraging this, RTD-Guard employs an off-the-shelf RTD discriminator-without fine-tuning-to localize suspicious tokens, masks them, and detects adversarial examples by observing the prediction confidence shift of the victim model before and after intervention. The entire process requires no adversarial data, model tuning, or internal model access, and uses only two black-box queries. Comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that RTD-Guard effectively detects adversarial texts generated by diverse state-of-the-art attack methods. It surpasses existing detection baselines across multiple metrics, offering a highly efficient, practical, and resource-light defense mechanism-particularly suited for real-world deployment in resource-constrained or privacy-sensitive environments.
Abstract:Explicit 3D representations have already become an essential medium for 3D simulation and understanding. However, the most commonly used point cloud and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) each suffer from non-photorealistic rendering and significant degradation under sparse inputs. In this paper, we introduce Sparse to Dense lifting (S2D), a novel pipeline that bridges the two representations and achieves high-quality 3DGS reconstruction with minimal inputs. Specifically, the S2D lifting is two-fold. We first present an efficient one-step diffusion model that lifts sparse point cloud for high-fidelity image artifact fixing. Meanwhile, to reconstruct 3D consistent scenes, we also design a corresponding reconstruction strategy with random sample drop and weighted gradient for robust model fitting from sparse input views to dense novel views. Extensive experiments show that S2D achieves the best consistency in generating novel view guidance and first-tier sparse view reconstruction quality under different input sparsity. By reconstructing stable scenes with the least possible captures among existing methods, S2D enables minimal input requirements for 3DGS applications.
Abstract:Recent deep research agents primarily improve performance by scaling reasoning depth, but this leads to high inference cost and latency in search-intensive scenarios. Moreover, generalization across heterogeneous research settings remains challenging. In this work, we propose \emph{Search More, Think Less} (SMTL), a framework for long-horizon agentic search that targets both efficiency and generalization. SMTL replaces sequential reasoning with parallel evidence acquisition, enabling efficient context management under constrained context budgets. To support generalization across task types, we further introduce a unified data synthesis pipeline that constructs search tasks spanning both deterministic question answering and open-ended research scenarios with task appropriate evaluation metrics. We train an end-to-end agent using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, achieving strong and often state of the art performance across benchmarks including BrowseComp (48.6\%), GAIA (75.7\%), Xbench (82.0\%), and DeepResearch Bench (45.9\%). Compared to Mirothinker-v1.0, SMTL with maximum 100 interaction steps reduces the average number of reasoning steps on BrowseComp by 70.7\%, while improving accuracy.
Abstract:Longitudinal medical report generation is clinically important yet remains challenging due to strict privacy constraints and the evolving nature of disease progression. Although federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training without data sharing, existing FL methods largely overlook longitudinal dynamics by assuming stationary client distributions, making them unable to model temporal shifts across visits or patient-specific heterogeneity-ultimately leading to unstable optimization and suboptimal report generation. We introduce Federated Temporal Adaptation (FTA), a federated setting that explicitly accounts for the temporal evolution of client data. Building upon this setting, we propose FedTAR, a framework that integrates demographic-driven personalization with time-aware global aggregation. FedTAR generates lightweight LoRA adapters from demographic embeddings and performs temporal residual aggregation, where updates from different visits are weighted by a meta-learned temporal policy optimized via first-order MAML. Experiments on J-MID (1M exams) and MIMIC-CXR demonstrate consistent improvements in linguistic accuracy, temporal coherence, and cross-site generalization, establishing FedTAR as a robust and privacy-preserving paradigm for federated longitudinal modeling.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have achieved success, but cost and privacy constraints necessitate deploying smaller models locally while offloading complex queries to cloud-based models. Existing router evaluations are unsystematic, overlooking scenario-specific requirements and out-of-distribution robustness. We propose RouterXBench, a principled evaluation framework with three dimensions: router ability, scenario alignment, and cross-domain robustness. Unlike prior work that relies on output probabilities or external embeddings, we utilize internal hidden states that capture model uncertainty before answer generation. We introduce ProbeDirichlet, a lightweight router that aggregates cross-layer hidden states via learnable Dirichlet distributions with probabilistic training. Trained on multi-domain data, it generalizes robustly across in-domain and out-of-distribution scenarios. Our results show ProbeDirichlet achieves 16.68% and 18.86% relative improvements over the best baselines in router ability and high-accuracy scenarios, with consistent performance across model families, model scales, heterogeneous tasks, and agentic workflows.
Abstract:Long-horizon planning is widely recognized as a core capability of autonomous LLM-based agents; however, current evaluation frameworks suffer from being largely episodic, domain-specific, or insufficiently grounded in persistent economic dynamics. We introduce EcoGym, a generalizable benchmark for continuous plan-and-execute decision making in interactive economies. EcoGym comprises three diverse environments: Vending, Freelance, and Operation, implemented in a unified decision-making process with standardized interfaces, and budgeted actions over an effectively unbounded horizon (1000+ steps if 365 day-loops for evaluation). The evaluation of EcoGym is based on business-relevant outcomes (e.g., net worth, income, and DAU), targeting long-term strategic coherence and robustness under partial observability and stochasticity. Experiments across eleven leading LLMs expose a systematic tension: no single model dominates across all three scenarios. Critically, we find that models exhibit significant suboptimality in either high-level strategies or efficient actions executions. EcoGym is released as an open, extensible testbed for transparent long-horizon agent evaluation and for studying controllability-utility trade-offs in realistic economic settings.
Abstract:Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to adapting large language models, yet training on complete datasets incurs prohibitive costs with diminishing returns. Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity: techniques optimized for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks, and vice versa. We observe that measuring entropy differences between base models and minimally instruction-tuned calibrated models reveals a pattern -- samples with the lowest differential entropy consistently yield optimal performance across domains, yet this principle manifests domain-adaptively: reasoning tasks favor entropy increase (cognitive expansion), while general tasks favor entropy decrease (cognitive compression). We introduce InstructDiff, a unified framework that operationalizes differential entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropy-based ranking. Extensive experiments show that InstructDiff achieves 17\% relative improvement over full data training on mathematical reasoning and 52\% for general instruction-following, outperforming prior baselines while using only 10\% of the data.