Abstract:Flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are now widely used for continuous robotic manipulation, and online reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a key technique for adapting them to new tasks. Existing RL methods typically inject stochasticity inside the denoising chain, often through isotropic or temporally independent noise. However, effective robot exploration calls for structured noise: temporally smooth and scaled differently across action groups. We show that simply switching the in-chain noise to a structured form does not suffice: noise added at an intermediate flow time can be weakened by the remaining denoising steps before execution, a phenomenon we call \emph{Structured Noise Dilution}. We propose \textbf{StructRL}, which avoids dilution by relocating policy stochasticity to the action space via three coupled choices: (i) a deterministic ODE decoder, (ii) structured noise injected directly in the action space, and (iii) last-step replay, where policy-gradient updates avoid assigning likelihoods to intermediate denoising states. This keeps structured exploration tied to the executed action while providing a tractable training signal for the flow decoder. Across three flow-based VLA models on multiple simulated manipulation benchmarks and two real-world tasks, StructRL improves exploration efficiency and OOD performance over prior in-chain baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured action-space exploration for adapting flow-based VLA with RL. \textbf{Project page:} https://flyfaerss.github.io/structrl/
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act in interactive settings where their behavioral styles affect user experience, safety, and downstream decision making. Existing LLM personality studies largely rely on self-report questionnaires administered in first-person settings, making the resulting profiles sensitive to surface elicitation choices and poorly grounded in concrete model behavior. In this work, we introduce a situated behavioral-data (B-data) framework for studying and controlling LLM behavioral personality. We construct 3,200 contrastive behavioral scenarios spanning 20 behavioral patterns and four prompt registers, grounded in validated psychometric facets such as BFI-2, DOSPERT, and HEXACO. Using this framework, we find that LLMs exhibit stable and model-specific behavioral profiles, while also revealing register-dependent shifts across first-person decisions, advice-giving, and task execution. We then show that these behavioral patterns can be controlled through Behavioral Mode Axes (BMAs), activation-space directions derived from contrastive behavioral traces. Compared with response-derived BMAs, which are more prone to trait drift, thought-derived BMAs more faithfully capture the intended behavioral mechanism and provide cleaner control over situated behavioral styles. Our results suggest that LLM personality-like tendencies are better understood not as abstract self-report traits, but as measurable and controllable behavioral modes grounded in concrete interaction contexts. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/lhz191/LLM-Behavioral-Personality.
Abstract:With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), harnesses have become essential infrastructure for deploying agents across a wide range of domains. The fast-evolving harness ecosystem has also made rigorous capability evaluation increasingly important. However, efficiently building an end-to-end, systematic, and comprehensive evaluation pipeline remains a significant challenge. To address this challenge, we introduce $A^2E$ (Agent Auditing Engine), an end-to-end evaluation engine designed for agent harnesses. $A^2E$ leverages our newly proposed Agent Task Protocol (ATP) to enable the rapid integration of evaluation tasks with different harnesses. Through an automatically instrumented Monitor, it captures and generates standardized execution traces during experiments. In the Evaluation stage, $A^2E$ systematically assesses harness capabilities using a suite of multidimensional metrics. Compared with correctness alone, these metrics provide a more fine-grained characterization of differences among harnesses in execution efficiency, tool use, task planning, and error recovery. Experiments conducted with $A^2E$ further reveal that model-harness combinations exhibit substantial performance variation across different types of tasks, and that no single combination consistently outperforms all others across every task. These findings not only demonstrate the necessity of systematic evaluation but also provide useful guidance for the co-evolving of models and harnesses. Our code is available at https://github.com/datamllab/A2E.
Abstract:With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), harnesses have become essential infrastructure for deploying agents across a wide range of domains. The fast-evolving harness ecosystem has also made rigorous capability evaluation increasingly important. However, efficiently building an end-to-end, systematic, and comprehensive evaluation pipeline remains a significant challenge. To address this challenge, we introduce $A^2E$ (Agent Auditing Engine), an end-to-end evaluation engine designed for agent harnesses. $A^2E$ leverages our newly proposed Agent Task Protocol (ATP) to enable the rapid integration of evaluation tasks with different harnesses. Through an automatically instrumented Monitor, it captures and generates standardized execution traces during experiments. In the Evaluation stage, $A^2E$ systematically assesses harness capabilities using a suite of multidimensional metrics. Compared with correctness alone, these metrics provide a more fine-grained characterization of differences among harnesses in execution efficiency, tool use, task planning, and error recovery. Experiments conducted with $A^2E$ further reveal that model-harness combinations exhibit substantial performance variation across different types of tasks, and that no single combination consistently outperforms all others across every task. These findings not only demonstrate the necessity of systematic evaluation but also provide useful guidance for the co-evolving of models and harnesses. Our code is available at https://github.com/datamllab/A2E.
Abstract:Early-stage molecular design is an iterative process, not just a task of generating molecules. Researchers turn broad goals into design strategies, refine candidates, assess many properties, and gather evidence before synthesis and tests. AI methods can generate molecules, optimize several goals, predict properties, dock compounds, and account for synthesis. Yet these functions are spread across specialized tools. Experts must still coordinate each step, judge interim results, and integrate evidence. The central challenge is thus to turn research intent into adaptive, traceable runs grounded in scientific tools. We cast this challenge as intent-to-evidence molecular design workflow execution and present CAi Copilot, an expert-oriented agent with three linked layers. The Research Interface Layer turns intent into an executable plan. The Agent Reasoning Layer uses interim results to guide each run. The Execution Substrate supplies molecular tools, metrics, reusable utilities, and backend services. Across 45 tasks, CAi achieves the strongest overall performance, with an outcome score of 84.59, exceeding the next-best result by 18.07 points. Additional benchmarks test how CAi coordinates generation, screening, and multi-criteria evaluation, while exposing limits in long-horizon execution. These results show that CAi turns broad molecular-design intent into transparent, traceable workflows that connect interim decisions to candidate-level evidence.
Abstract:Safety-aligned large language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet embedding the same requests in particular scenarios can bypass their safeguards. Existing red-teaming methods empirically identify effective scenarios through observed attack outcomes, but why particular scenarios weaken refusal remains mechanistically unclear. Meanwhile, mechanistic interpretability studies have characterized both refusal directions and jailbreak-associated features, without explaining the relationship between the two representations. In this work, we show that scenario-wrapped prompts activate internal scenario directions whose causal steering consistently reduces refusal scores. Building on this finding, we propose \textsc{Concept2Scenario}, a concept-based attribution framework for vulnerable scenario discovery. It instantiates a broad concept space with a sparse autoencoder, attributes refusal suppression to individual concepts, translates the identified concepts into interpretable natural-language scenarios, and identifies synergistic scenario combinations through interaction attribution. Across three open-source models, two safety benchmarks, and six black-box jailbreak methods, the discovered scenarios serve as reusable priors that improve average attack success rates by up to $18.2$ percentage points. They also transfer to GPT-5, Claude-Haiku-4.5, and Gemini-3-Flash, suggesting that some scenario-level refusal vulnerabilities are shared across model families. Moreover, the identified combinations outperform their individual constituents and enable iterative attacks to succeed in fewer turns.
Abstract:Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a prevailing method for adapting large language models to reasoning tasks by imitating offline expert demonstrations, often treating a single expert trajectory as the target behavior. However, reasoning is not simple path imitation: rigidly following one demonstrated solution may overfit to surface forms and suppress the model's own reasoning distribution. We propose Rollout-Adaptive Supervised Fine-Tuning (RASFT), a policy-aware SFT framework that calibrates expert supervision according to problem-level solvability estimated from verified on-policy rollouts. For each problem, RASFT strengthens expert guidance when the current policy struggles, while relaxing rigid imitation and incorporating correct self-generated trajectories when the model already exhibits reliable reasoning behavior. To preserve useful reasoning priors, RASFT further introduces a clipped inverse ratio between the frozen reference model and the current policy to constrain excessive policy drift. Experiments across multiple models on six mathematical reasoning benchmarks and two code reasoning benchmarks show that RASFT achieves better overall performance than SFT, SFT variants, and representative RL methods. The code is available at https://github.com/zjd1sq/RASFT.
Abstract:LLM-based agents are rapidly advancing, autonomously invoking external tools to complete multi-step tasks for users. However, agents often acquire more sensitive information than the task requires. Existing privacy benchmarks audit what the agent's response or outgoing actions disclose, but overlook the acquisition stage where data first enters the agent's context. The over-acquired information is then one careless action or one attack away from an outright leak. To assess its prevalence, we introduce \emph{PrivacyPeek}, a benchmark for evaluating acquisition-stage privacy leakage of LLM-based agents, with $1{,}182$ cases across $7$ acquisition behaviours and $16$ application domains. Specifically, \emph{Acquisition Inspection} examines the agent's tool-call trajectory, both the tools it invokes and the data it receives, to detect when it acquires sensitive information beyond the task scope. \emph{Probe Elicitation} then issues a follow-up probe and measures how readily an attacker could elicit sensitive information the agent acquired but did not disclose. Our experiments on 10 LLM-based agents across 4 model families show that the unnecessary acquisition of sensitive information is widespread. In addition, we observe a correlation between the task-completion capability and acquisition-stage leakage. Prompt-level defences reduce only a small fraction of acquisition-stage leakage, leaving the majority unmitigated. These results make auditing acquisition-stage privacy both urgent and necessary. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Xuan269/PrivacyPeek-Resource.
Abstract:LLM agents now draw on growing skill libraries to handle complex tasks. However, injecting more skills does not always improve task completion and can even degrade it. Existing methods still treat skill injection as a static step, selecting skills with fixed criteria, fixing the budget in advance, and leaving descriptions unchanged. We argue that this static treatment can undermine the utility of skills, because which skills are exposed, how many are included, and how they are presented all affect downstream performance. We propose SkillsInjector, a two-stage adaptive method that jointly addresses these decisions. First, a context planner learns execution-grounded skill preferences and admits an adaptive number of skills for each task. A set-aware renderer then tailors how selected descriptions are presented relative to their co-injected neighbors. Across tau2-bench, SkillsBench, and ALFWorld, SkillsInjector achieves the highest score, improving over the strongest baseline by 3.9, 6.1, and 7.3 percentage points, respectively. Ablation studies show that skill selection, adaptive budgeting, and set-aware rendering each contribute to the gain. These results show that skill-augmented agents benefit from optimizing the injected context itself. Code will be released upon publication
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for generating data across various modalities. By transforming data from a scarce resource into a controllable asset, LLMs mitigate the bottlenecks imposed by the acquisition costs of real-world data for model training, evaluation, and system iteration. However, ensuring the high quality of LLM-generated synthetic data remains a critical challenge. Existing research primarily focuses on generation methodologies, with limited direct attention to the quality of the resulting data. Furthermore, most studies are restricted to single modalities, lacking a unified perspective across different data types. To bridge this gap, we propose the \textbf{LLM Data Auditor framework}. In this framework, we first describe how LLMs are utilized to generate data across six distinct modalities. More importantly, we systematically categorize intrinsic metrics for evaluating synthetic data from two dimensions: quality and trustworthiness. This approach shifts the focus from extrinsic evaluation, which relies on downstream task performance, to the inherent properties of the data itself. Using this evaluation system, we analyze the experimental evaluations of representative generation methods for each modality and identify substantial deficiencies in current evaluation practices. Based on these findings, we offer concrete recommendations for the community to improve the evaluation of data generation. Finally, the framework outlines methodologies for the practical application of synthetic data across different modalities.