Heqing Huang


2026

Restoring power distribution networks after disruptions demands rapid, reliable coordination across repair crews, mobile power sources, and switching actions under strict constraints. Classical optimization yields high-quality plans but can be slow, while reinforcement learning often requires feeder-specific training and careful reward shaping. We recast restoration as language-conditioned planning: a large language model generates high-level restoration plans over a compact pre-validated catalogue of feasible actions. This constrained generation design makes decisions reliably, scalably, and interpretably, and allows for real-time human-in-the-loop decision-making while requiring no topology-specific setup or retraining. Our method achieves near-mixed-integer-linear programming performance on the IEEE 13-node standard power distribution feeder and outperforms a time-capped MILP solver on the IEEE 33-node standard feeder by around 13%, while using less than 1% of its wall-clock runtime.
WebAgents have demonstrated strong capabilities in autonomously completing complex web tasks, yet their computational efficiency vulnerabilities have received limited attention. Adversaries can inject malicious prompts into web pages, causing WebAgents to generate unnecessarily long reasoning processes and incur excessive computational cost, termed Computational Cost Attacks (CCA). In this paper, to systematically study this vulnerability under realistic black-box settings, we propose CostBomb, a generation-then-selection attack framework that leverages large language models to generate diverse adversarial prompts and a reinforcement learning–enhanced selector to identify the most effective perturbations. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world web benchmarks reveal that existing WebAgents are highly vulnerable to CCA, suffering substantial increases in computational cost without compromising successful task completion. Our findings highlight an overlooked dimension of WebAgent robustness and underscore the urgent need for efficiency-aware defenses.