Deep Learning
GUI-360$^\circ$: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Computer-Using Agents
Mu, Jian, Zhang, Chaoyun, Ni, Chiming, Wang, Lu, Qiao, Bo, Mathur, Kartik, Wu, Qianhui, Xie, Yuhang, Ma, Xiaojun, Zhou, Mengyu, Qin, Si, Li, Liqun, Kang, Yu, Ma, Minghua, Lin, Qingwei, Rajmohan, Saravan, Zhang, Dongmei
We introduce GUI-360$^\circ$, a large-scale, comprehensive dataset and benchmark suite designed to advance computer-using agents (CUAs). CUAs present unique challenges and is constrained by three persistent gaps: a scarcity of real-world CUA tasks, the lack of automated collection-and-annotation pipelines for multi-modal trajectories, and the absence of a unified benchmark that jointly evaluates GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction. GUI-360$^\circ$ addresses these gaps with an LLM-augmented, largely automated pipeline for query sourcing, environment-template construction, task instantiation, batched execution, and LLM-driven quality filtering. The released corpus contains over 1.2M executed action steps across thousands of trajectories in popular Windows office applications, and includes full-resolution screenshots, accessibility metadata when available, instantiated goals, intermediate reasoning traces, and both successful and failed action trajectories. The dataset supports three canonical tasks, GUI grounding, screen parsing, and action prediction, and a hybrid GUI+API action space that reflects modern agent designs. Benchmarking state-of-the-art vision--language models on GUI-360$^\circ$ reveals substantial out-of-the-box shortcomings in grounding and action prediction; supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield significant gains but do not close the gap to human-level reliability. We release GUI-360$^\circ$ and accompanying code to facilitate reproducible research and accelerate progress on robust desktop CUAs. The full dataset has been made public on https://huggingface.co/datasets/vyokky/GUI-360.
Agentmandering: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Fair Redistricting via Large Language Model Agents
Li, Hao, Chen, Haotian, Gong, Ruoyuan, Wang, Juanjuan, Jiang, Hao
Redistricting plays a central role in shaping how votes are translated into political power. While existing computational methods primarily aim to generate large ensembles of legally valid districting plans, they often neglect the strategic dynamics involved in the selection process. This oversight creates opportunities for partisan actors to cherry-pick maps that, while technically compliant, are politically advantageous. Simply satisfying formal constraints does not ensure fairness when the selection process itself can be manipulated. We propose \textbf{Agentmandering}, a framework that reimagines redistricting as a turn-based negotiation between two agents representing opposing political interests. Drawing inspiration from game-theoretic ideas, particularly the \textit{Choose-and-Freeze} protocol, our method embeds strategic interaction into the redistricting process via large language model (LLM) agents. Agents alternate between selecting and freezing districts from a small set of candidate maps, gradually partitioning the state through constrained and interpretable choices. Evaluation on post-2020 U.S. Census data across all states shows that Agentmandering significantly reduces partisan bias and unfairness, while achieving 2 to 3 orders of magnitude lower variance than standard baselines. These results demonstrate both fairness and stability, especially in swing-state scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lihaogx/AgentMandering.
Scaling Agent Learning via Experience Synthesis
Chen, Zhaorun, Zhao, Zhuokai, Zhang, Kai, Liu, Bo, Qi, Qi, Wu, Yifan, Kalluri, Tarun, Cao, Sara, Xiong, Yuanhao, Tong, Haibo, Yao, Huaxiu, Li, Hengduo, Zhu, Jiacheng, Li, Xian, Song, Dawn, Li, Bo, Weston, Jason, Huynh, Dat
While reinforcement learning (RL) can empower autonomous agents by enabling self-improvement through interaction, its practical adoption remains challenging due to costly rollouts, limited task diversity, unreliable reward signals, and infrastructure complexity, all of which obstruct the collection of scalable experience data. To address these challenges, we introduce DreamGym, the first unified framework designed to synthesize diverse experiences with scalability in mind to enable effective online RL training for autonomous agents. Rather than relying on expensive real-environment rollouts, DreamGym distills environment dynamics into a reasoning-based experience model that derives consistent state transitions and feedback signals through step-by-step reasoning, enabling scalable agent rollout collection for RL. To improve the stability and quality of transitions, DreamGym leverages an experience replay buffer initialized with offline real-world data and continuously enriched with fresh interactions to actively support agent training. To improve knowledge acquisition, DreamGym adaptively generates new tasks that challenge the current agent policy, enabling more effective online curriculum learning. Experiments across diverse environments and agent backbones demonstrate that DreamGym substantially improves RL training, both in fully synthetic settings and in sim-to-real transfer scenarios. On non-RL-ready tasks like WebArena, DreamGym outperforms all baselines by over 30%. And in RL-ready but costly settings, it matches GRPO and PPO performance using only synthetic interactions. When transferring a policy trained purely on synthetic experiences to real-environment RL, DreamGym yields significant additional performance gains while requiring far fewer real-world interactions, providing a scalable warm-start strategy for general-purpose RL.
Exploratory Analysis of Cyberattack Patterns on E-Commerce Platforms Using Statistical Methods
Cyberattacks on e-commerce platforms have grown in sophistication, threatening consumer trust and operational continuity. This research presents a hybrid analytical framework that integrates statistical modelling and machine learning for detecting and forecasting cyberattack patterns in the e-commerce domain. Using the Verizon Community Data Breach (VCDB) dataset, the study applies Auto ARIMA for temporal forecasting and significance testing, including a Mann-Whitney U test (U = 2579981.5, p = 0.0121), which confirmed that holiday shopping events experienced significantly more severe cyberattacks than non-holiday periods. ANOVA was also used to examine seasonal variation in threat severity, while ensemble machine learning models (XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost) were employed for predictive classification. Results reveal recurrent attack spikes during high-risk periods such as Black Friday and holiday seasons, with breaches involving Personally Identifiable Information (PII) exhibiting elevated threat indicators. Among the models, CatBoost achieved the highest performance (accuracy = 85.29%, F1 score = 0.2254, ROC AUC = 0.8247). The framework uniquely combines seasonal forecasting with interpretable ensemble learning, enabling temporal risk anticipation and breach-type classification. Ethical considerations, including responsible use of sensitive data and bias assessment, were incorporated. Despite class imbalance and reliance on historical data, the study provides insights for proactive cybersecurity resource allocation and outlines directions for future real-time threat detection research.
MM-UNet: Morph Mamba U-shaped Convolutional Networks for Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Liu, Jiawen, Zeng, Yuanbo, Liang, Jiaming, Yang, Yizhen, Zhang, Yiheng, Cai, Enhui, Sheng, Xiaoqi, Cai, Hongmin
Accurate detection of retinal vessels plays a critical role in reflecting a wide range of health status indicators in the clinical diagnosis of ocular diseases. Recently, advances in deep learning have led to a surge in retinal vessel segmentation methods, which have significantly contributed to the quantitative analysis of vascular morphology. However, retinal vasculature differs significantly from conventional segmentation targets in that it consists of extremely thin and branching structures, whose global morphology varies greatly across images. These characteristics continue to pose challenges to segmentation precision and robustness. To address these issues, we propose MM-UNet, a novel architecture tailored for efficient retinal vessel segmentation. The model incorporates Morph Mamba Convolution layers, which replace pointwise convolutions to enhance branching topological perception through morph, state-aware feature sampling. Additionally, Reverse Selective State Guidance modules integrate reverse guidance theory with state-space modeling to improve geometric boundary awareness and decoding efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on two public retinal vessel segmentation datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in segmentation accuracy. Compared to the existing approaches, MM-UNet achieves F1-score gains of 1.64 % on DRIVE and 1.25 % on STARE, demonstrating its effectiveness and advancement. The project code is public via https://github.com/liujiawen-jpg/MM-UNet.
A Step Toward World Models: A Survey on Robotic Manipulation
Zhang, Peng-Fei, Cheng, Ying, Sun, Xiaofan, Wang, Shijie, Li, Fengling, Zhu, Lei, Shen, Heng Tao
Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to operate in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments, performing tasks such as manipulation, navigation, and decision-making. Achieving these capabilities requires agents to understand the underlying mechanisms and dynamics of the world, moving beyond reactive control or simple replication of observed states. This motivates the development of world models as internal representations that encode environmental states, capture dynamics, and support prediction, planning, and reasoning. Despite growing interest, the definition, scope, architectures, and essential capabilities of world models remain ambiguous. In this survey, we go beyond prescribing a fixed definition and limiting our scope to methods explicitly labeled as world models. Instead, we examine approaches that exhibit the core capabilities of world models through a review of methods in robotic manipulation. We analyze their roles across perception, prediction, and control, identify key challenges and solutions, and distill the core components, capabilities, and functions that a fully realized world model should possess. Building on this analysis, we aim to motivate further development toward generalizable and practical world models for robotics.
Tool Zero: Training Tool-Augmented LLMs via Pure RL from Scratch
Zeng, Yirong, Ding, Xiao, Hou, Yutai, Wang, Yuxian, Du, Li, Dai, Juyi, Ding, Qiuyang, Tang, Duyu, Tu, Dandan, Liu, Weiwen, Qin, Bing, Liu, Ting
Training tool-augmented LLMs has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing language models' capabilities for complex tasks. The current supervised fine-tuning paradigm relies on constructing extensive domain-specific datasets to train models. However, this approach often struggles to generalize effectively to unfamiliar or intricate tool-use scenarios. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm can endow LLMs with superior reasoning and generalization abilities. In this work, we address a key question: Can the pure RL be used to effectively elicit a model's intrinsic reasoning capabilities and enhance the tool-agnostic generalization? We propose a dynamic generalization-guided reward design for rule-based RL, which progressively shifts rewards from exploratory to exploitative tool-use patterns. Based on this design, we introduce the Tool-Zero series models. These models are trained to enable LLMs to autonomously utilize general tools by directly scaling up RL from Zero models (i.e., base models without post-training). Experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve over 7% performance improvement compared to both SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. These gains are consistently replicated across cross-dataset and intra-dataset evaluations, validating the effectiveness and robustness of our methods.
Scam Shield: Multi-Model Voting and Fine-Tuned LLMs Against Adversarial Attacks
Chang, Chen-Wei, Sarkar, Shailik, Salemi, Hossein, Kim, Hyungmin, Mitra, Shutonu, Purohit, Hemant, Zhang, Fengxiu, Hong, Michin, Cho, Jin-Hee, Lu, Chang-Tien
Scam detection remains a critical challenge in cybersecurity as adversaries craft messages that evade automated filters. We propose a Hierarchical Scam Detection System (HSDS) that combines a lightweight multi-model voting front end with a fine-tuned LLaMA 3.1 8B Instruct back end to improve accuracy and robustness against adversarial attacks. An ensemble of four classifiers provides preliminary predictions through majority vote, and ambiguous cases are escalated to the fine-tuned model, which is optimized with adversarial training to reduce misclassification. Experiments show that this hierarchical design both improves adversarial scam detection and shortens inference time by routing most cases away from the LLM, outperforming traditional machine-learning baselines and proprietary LLM baselines. The findings highlight the effectiveness of a hybrid voting mechanism and adversarial fine-tuning in fortifying LLMs against evolving scam tactics, enhancing the resilience of automated scam detection systems.
PreferThinker: Reasoning-based Personalized Image Preference Assessment
Xu, Shengqi, Zhou, Xinpeng, Zhang, Yabo, Liu, Ming, Liang, Tao, Zhang, Tianyu, Bai, Yalong, Wu, Zuxuan, Zuo, Wangmeng
Personalized image preference assessment aims to evaluate an individual user's image preferences by relying only on a small set of reference images as prior information. Existing methods mainly focus on general preference assessment, training models with large-scale data to tackle well-defined tasks such as text-image alignment. However, these approaches struggle to handle personalized preference because user-specific data are scarce and not easily scalable, and individual tastes are often diverse and complex. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a common preference profile that serves as a bridge across users, allowing large-scale user data to be leveraged for training profile prediction and capturing complex personalized preferences. Building on this idea, we propose a reasoning-based personalized image preference assessment framework that follows a \textit{predict-then-assess} paradigm: it first predicts a user's preference profile from reference images, and then provides interpretable, multi-dimensional scores and assessments of candidate images based on the predicted profile. To support this, we first construct a large-scale Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-style personalized assessment dataset annotated with diverse user preference profiles and high-quality CoT-style reasoning, enabling explicit supervision of structured reasoning. Next, we adopt a two-stage training strategy: a cold-start supervised fine-tuning phase to empower the model with structured reasoning capabilities, followed by reinforcement learning to incentivize the model to explore more reasonable assessment paths and enhance generalization. Furthermore, we propose a similarity-aware prediction reward to encourage better prediction of the user's preference profile, which facilitates more reasonable assessments exploration. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
Improving Robustness to Out-of-Distribution States in Imitation Learning via Deep Koopman-Boosted Diffusion Policy
Huang, Dianye, Navab, Nassir, Jiang, Zhongliang
Abstract--Integrating generative models with action chunking has shown significant promise in imitation learning for robotic manipulation. However, the existing diffusion-based paradigm often struggles to capture strong temporal dependencies across multiple steps, particularly when incorporating proprioceptive input. This limitation can lead to task failures, where the policy overfits to proprioceptive cues at the expense of capturing the visually derived features of the task. T o overcome this challenge, we propose the Deep Koopman-boosted Dual-branch Diffusion Policy (D3P) algorithm. D3P introduces a dual-branch architecture to decouple the roles of different sensory modality combinations. The visual branch encodes the visual observations to indicate task progression, while the fused branch integrates both visual and proprioceptive inputs for precise manipulation. Within this architecture, when the robot fails to accomplish intermediate goals, such as grasping a drawer handle, the policy can dynamically switch to execute action chunks generated by the visual branch, allowing recovery to previously observed states and facilitating retrial of the task. T o further enhance visual representation learning, we incorporate a Deep Koopman Operator module that captures structured temporal dynamics from visual inputs. During inference, we use the test-time loss of the generative model as a confidence signal to guide the aggregation of the temporally overlapping predicted action chunks, thereby enhancing the reliability of policy execution. In simulation experiments across six RLBench tabletop tasks, D3P outperforms the state-of-the-art diffusion policy by an average of 14.6%. On three real-world robotic manipulation tasks, it achieves a 15.0% improvement.