Ce Zhang
CMU
Unverified author pages with similar names: Ce Zhang
2026
WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models
Rui Wang | Ce Zhang | Jun-Yu Ma | Jianshu Zhang | Hongru Wang | Yi Chen | Boyang Xue | Tianqing Fang | Zhisong Zhang | Hongming Zhang | Haitao Mi | Dong Yu | Kam-Fai Wong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Rui Wang | Ce Zhang | Jun-Yu Ma | Jianshu Zhang | Hongru Wang | Yi Chen | Boyang Xue | Tianqing Fang | Zhisong Zhang | Hongming Zhang | Haitao Mi | Dong Yu | Kam-Fai Wong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The hallmark of Deep Research agents lies in compositional reasoning, the capacity to aggregate distributed, heterogeneous information into coherent logical insights. However, current agentic systems are often retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light, where success is predominantly determined by simple entity-seeking rather than the multi-step aggregation of scattered evidence. To address this, we propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator, designed to shift the agentic paradigm from retrieval-centric to compositional aggregation. Our approach first employs Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge, then Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions using over 12 composition guidelines derived from a rigorous deconstruction of the Deep Research problem setting. Fine-tuning on this corpus fundamentally transforms agent behavior, fostering deliberate composition reasoning and reduced tool redundancy. The resulting WebAggregator-32B surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. To address the lack of benchmarks that emphasize both reasoning and retrieval, we introduce the WebAggregatorQA testbed, which reveals that even with perfect retrieval, top-tier models still underperformed. These results demonstrate that compositional reasoning, not retrieval, is the true performance ceiling for next-generation research agents.
2025
InstructPart: Task-Oriented Part Segmentation with Instruction Reasoning
Zifu Wan | Yaqi Xie | Ce Zhang | Zhiqiu Lin | Zihan Wang | Simon Stepputtis | Deva Ramanan | Katia P. Sycara
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zifu Wan | Yaqi Xie | Ce Zhang | Zhiqiu Lin | Zihan Wang | Simon Stepputtis | Deva Ramanan | Katia P. Sycara
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large multimodal foundation models, particularly in the domains of language and vision, have significantly advanced various tasks, including robotics, autonomous driving, information retrieval, and grounding. However, many of these models perceive objects as indivisible, overlooking the components that constitute them. Understanding these components and their associated affordances provides valuable insights into an object’s functionality, which is fundamental for performing a wide range of tasks. In this work, we introduce a novel real-world benchmark, InstructPart, comprising hand-labeled part segmentation annotations and task-oriented instructions to evaluate the performance of current models in understanding and executing part-level tasks within everyday contexts. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that task-oriented part segmentation remains a challenging problem, even for state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs). In addition to our benchmark, we introduce a simple baseline that achieves a twofold performance improvement through fine-tuning with our dataset. With our dataset and benchmark, we aim to facilitate research on task-oriented part segmentation and enhance the applicability of VLMs across various domains, including robotics, virtual reality, information retrieval, and other related fields. Project website: https://zifuwan.github.io/InstructPart/.