University of Illinois at Chicago
Abstract:Agentic reinforcement learning trains large language models using multi-turn trajectories that interleave long reasoning traces with short environment-facing actions. Common policy-gradient methods, such as PPO and GRPO, treat each token in a trajectory equally, leading to uniform credit assignment. In this paper, we critically demonstrate that such uniform credit assignment largely misallocates token-level training signals. From an energy-based modeling perspective, we show that token-level training signals, quantified by their correlations with reward variance of different rollouts sampled from a given prompt, concentrate sharply on action tokens rather than reasoning tokens, even though action tokens account for only a small fraction of the trajectory. We refer to this phenomenon as the Action Bottleneck. Motivated by this observation, we propose an embarrassingly simple token reweighting approach, ActFocus, that downweights gradients on reasoning tokens, along with an additional energy-based redistribution mechanism that further increases the weights on action tokens with higher uncertainty. Across four environments and different model sizes, ActFocus consistently outperforms PPO and GRPO, yielding final-step gains of up to 65.2 and 63.7 percentage points, respectively, without any additional runtime or memory cost.
Abstract:Dynamic graphs are ubiquitous in real-world systems, and building generalizable dynamic Graph Foundation Models has become a frontier in graph learning. However, dynamic graphs from different domains pose fundamental challenges to unified modeling, as their semantic and temporal patterns are inherently inconsistent, making the multi-domain pre-training difficult. Consequently, the widely used "pretrain-then-finetune" paradigm often suffers from severe negative knowledge transfer. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no multi-domain dynamic GFM. In this work, we propose DyGFM, a Dynamic Graph Foundation Model over multiple domains based on decoupled and divergence-conditioned prompting. To disentangle transferable semantics from the domain-specific dynamics, we introduce a dual-branch pre-training strategy with semantic-temporal decoupling. To alleviate negative transfer during domain adaptation, we further develop a cross-domain routing mechanism with divergence-aware expert selection. To enable efficient downstream fine-tuning, we design a divergence-conditioned prompt generator that injects lightweight, learnable graph prompts tailored to semantic and temporal traits. Extensive experiments on continuous dynamic graph benchmarks demonstrate that DyGFM consistently outperforms 12 state-of-the-art baselines on both node classification and link prediction tasks, achieving superior effectiveness and efficiency.
Abstract:Multimodal recommender systems exploit visual and textual signals to alleviate data sparsity, but this also makes them more vulnerable to evasion-based promotion attacks. Existing defenses are largely limited to single-modal settings and mainly focus on poisoning-based threats, leaving evasion-based threats underexplored. In this work, we first identify a cross-modal gradient mismatch under the multi-user promotion setting, where visual and textual perturbations are optimized in inconsistent directions due to the dominance of distinct user groups. This phenomenon dilutes the attack effectiveness and leads robust training to underestimate worst-case risks. To address this issue, we propose Untargeted Adversarial Training with Multimodal Coordination (UAT-MC). UAT-MC tackles the challenge of unknown targeted items in evasion-based attacks (as opposed to poisoning-based attacks) by treating all items as potential targets, and introduces a gradient alignment mechanism to explicitly correct this mismatch. This design ensures synchronized perturbations across modalities, thereby maximizing adversarial strength for robust training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UAT-MC significantly improves robustness against promotion attacks while maintaining acceptable recommendation performance under the defense-accuracy trade-off. Code is available at https://github.com/gmXian/UAT-MC.
Abstract:Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has become a core paradigm for post-training large language models, yet its training process remains highly fragile. Existing efforts mainly improve reliability at the system level or address specific issues in individual subproblems by modifying RFT algorithms. Despite their effectiveness, they largely overlook the problem of failure management at the training-process level. When training goes wrong, practitioners still rely heavily on expert-driven manual inspection and correction, and automatic failure management for RFT remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we take a first step toward systematic failure management for reinforcement fine-tuning. To understand the empirical structure of RFT failures, we first construct RFT-FaultBench, the first benchmark for fine-grained failures in reinforcement fine-tuning, covering 5 fault families, 16 fault types, 779 training runs, 22,549 train-step records, and 1,457,288 trajectory-level records. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study showing that RFT failures are both observable from training dynamics and distinguishable through their empirical fault fingerprints. Building on these findings, we propose RFT-FM, an automatic failure management framework for reinforcement fine-tuning that unifies anomaly detection, failure diagnosis, and auto remediation in a closed loop. Experimental results show that RFT-FaultBench is neither trivial nor saturated: it exhibits clear anomaly structure while still posing substantial challenges, especially under subtle fault settings. Moreover, RFT-FM shows strong capability in detecting, diagnosing, and mitigating RFT failures.
Abstract:Adversarial training is effective on balanced datasets, but its robustness degrades under longtailed class distributions, where tail classes suffer high robust error and unstable decision boundaries. We propose Manifold-Constrained Adversarial Training (MCAT), a unified framework that enforces the semantic validity of adversarial examples by penalizing deviations from class-conditional manifolds in feature space, while promoting balanced geometric separation across classes via an ETF-inspired regularization. We provide theoretical results that link geometric separation to lower bounds on adversarially robust margins, and show that manifold-constrained adversarial risk upperbounds robust risk on high-density semantic regions. Extensive experiments on standard longtailed benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in overall, balanced, and tail-class adversarial robustness.
Abstract:To sustain coherent long-term interactions, Large Language Model (LLM) agents must navigate the tension between acquiring new information and retaining prior knowledge. Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise. Conversely, discrete structured memory architectures provide robust knowledge retention but often struggle to adapt to evolving narratives. To address this, we propose GAM, a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to effectively resolve the conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention. By isolating ongoing dialogue in an event progression graph and integrating it into a topic associative network only upon semantic shifts, our approach minimizes interference while preserving long-term consistency. Additionally, we introduce a graph-guided, multi-factor retrieval strategy to enhance context precision. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongDialQA indicate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both reasoning accuracy and efficiency.
Abstract:Fraud detection on graph data can be viewed as a demanding task that requires distinguishing between different types of nodes. Because graph neural networks (GNNs) are naturally suited for processing information encoded in graph form through their message-passing operations, methods based on GNN models have increasingly attracted attention in the fraud detection domain. However, fraud graphs inherently exhibit relation camouflage, high heterophily, and class imbalance, causing most GNNs to underperform in fraud detection tasks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Graph-Based Fraud Detection Model with Dual-Path Graph Filtering (DPF-GFD). DPF-GFD first applies a beta wavelet-based operator to the original graph to capture key structural patterns. It then constructs a similarity graph from distance-based node representations and applies an improved low-pass filter. The embeddings from the original and similarity graphs are fused through supervised representation learning to obtain node features, which are finally used by an ensemble tree model to assess the fraud risk of unlabeled nodes. Unlike existing single-graph smoothing approaches, DPF-GFD introduces a frequency-complementary dual-path filtering paradigm tailored for fraud detection, explicitly decoupling structural anomaly modeling and feature similarity modeling. This design enables more discriminative and stable node representations in highly heterophilous and imbalanced fraud graphs. Comprehensive experiments on four real-world financial fraud detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Abstract:Social bot detection is critical to the stability and security of online social platforms. However, current state-of-the-art bot detection models are largely developed in isolation, overlooking the benefits of leveraging shared detection patterns across platforms to improve performance and promptly identify emerging bot variants. The heterogeneity of data distributions and model architectures further complicates the design of an effective cross-platform and cross-model detection framework. To address these challenges, we propose FedRio (Personalized Federated Social Bot Detection with Cooperative Reinforced Contrastive Adversarial Distillation framework. We first introduce an adaptive message-passing module as the graph neural network backbone for each client. To facilitate efficient knowledge sharing of global data distributions, we design a federated knowledge extraction mechanism based on generative adversarial networks. Additionally, we employ a multi-stage adversarial contrastive learning strategy to enforce feature space consistency among clients and reduce divergence between local and global models. Finally, we adopt adaptive server-side parameter aggregation and reinforcement learning-based client-side parameter control to better accommodate data heterogeneity in heterogeneous federated settings. Extensive experiments on two real-world social bot detection benchmarks demonstrate that FedRio consistently outperforms state-of-the-art federated learning baselines in detection accuracy, communication efficiency, and feature space consistency, while remaining competitive with published centralized results under substantially stronger privacy constraints.
Abstract:Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models exhibit striking performance disparities across languages, yet the internal mechanisms driving these gaps remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of expert routing patterns in MoE models, revealing a phenomenon we term Language Routing Isolation, in which high- and low-resource languages tend to activate largely disjoint expert sets. Through layer-stratified analysis, we further show that routing patterns exhibit a layer-wise convergence-divergence pattern across model depth. Building on these findings, we propose RISE (Routing Isolation-guided Subnetwork Enhancement), a framework that exploits routing isolation to identify and adapt language-specific expert subnetworks. RISE applies a tripartite selection strategy, using specificity scores to identify language-specific experts in shallow and deep layers and overlap scores to select universal experts in middle layers. By training only the selected subnetwork while freezing all other parameters, RISE substantially improves low-resource language performance while preserving capabilities in other languages. Experiments on 10 languages demonstrate that RISE achieves target-language F1 gains of up to 10.85% with minimal cross-lingual degradation.
Abstract:Anthropic proposes the concept of skills for LLM agents to tackle multi-step professional tasks that simple tool invocations cannot address. A tool is a single, self-contained function, whereas a skill is a structured bundle of interdependent multi-file artifacts. Currently, skill generation is not only label-intensive due to manual authoring, but also may suffer from human--machine cognitive misalignment, which can lead to degraded agent performance, as evidenced by evaluations on SkillsBench. Therefore, we aim to enable agents to autonomously generate skills. However, existing self-evolving methods designed for tools cannot be directly applied to skills due to their increased complexity. To address these issues, we propose EvoSkills, a self-evolving skills framework that enables agents to autonomously construct complex, multi-file skill packages. Specifically, EvoSkills couples a Skill Generator that iteratively refines skills with a Surrogate Verifier that co-evolves to provide informative and actionable feedback without access to ground-truth test content. On SkillsBench, EvoSkills achieves the highest pass rate among five baselines on both Claude Code and Codex, and also exhibits strong generalization capabilities to six additional LLMs.