Jiale Liu


2026

In open-ended domains, teams must reconcile diverse viewpoints to produce strong deliverables. Answer aggregation approaches commonly used in closed domains are ill-suited to this setting, as they tend to suppress minority perspectives rather than resolve underlying disagreements. We present TeamFusion, a multi-agent system designed to support teamwork in open-ended domains by: 1. Instantiating a proxy agent for each team member conditioned on their expressed preferences; 2. Conducting a structured discussion to elicit agreements and disagreements; and 3. Synthesizing more consensus-oriented deliverables that feed into new iterations of discussion and synthesis. We evaluate TeamFusion on two teamwork tasks where team members can judge how well their individual views are represented in team decisions and how consensually good the final deliverables are, finding that it outperforms direct aggregation baselines across metrics, tasks, and team configurations.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong multimodal reasoning capability on Visual-Question-Answering (VQA) benchmarks. However, their robustness against textual misinformation remains under-explored. While existing research has extensively studied the effect of misinformation in text-only domains, it is not clear how VLMs arbitrate between contradictory information from different modalities. To bridge the gap, we first propose the ConText-VQA (i.e. Conflicting Text) dataset, consisting of image-question pairs together with systematically generated persuasive prompts that deliberately conflict with visual evidence. Then, a thorough testing framework is designed and executed to benchmark the susceptibility of various models to these conflicting textual inputs. Comprehensive experiments over 11 state-of-the-art VLMs reveal that these models are indeed vulnerable to misleading prompts, often overriding clear visual evidence in favor of the conflicting text, and show an average performance drop of over 48.2% after only one round of persuasive conversation. Our findings highlight a critical limitation in current VLMs and underscore the need for improved robustness against textual manipulation.
Currently, large language models (LLMs) have significant limitations in spatial reasoning, particularly in the absence of visual input. To address this issue, we introduce SODA (Spatial OODA), which draws inspiration from the OODA cognitive loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), originally designed to enhance human decision-making in dynamic environments. Specifically, we embed the OODA loop into multiple control tasks, generating the SPOD-143k dataset, and successfully integrate it into LLMs through a two-phase and spatia-aware training strategy (SFT and GRPO). Furthermore, to fill the gap in evaluating spatial reasoning in purely text-based LLMs, we introduce the SPOD-Bench benchmark, including multiple tasks divided into three levels of difficulty. Experimental results show that SODA significantly enhances the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs across testing scenarios including SPOD-Bench, SPACE and applications, providing a replicable and effective paradigm for improving the spatial cognition of LLMs.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a powerful technique for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with external, up-to-date knowledge. Graph RAG has emerged as an advanced paradigm that leverages graph-based knowledge structures to provide more coherent and contextually rich answers. However, the move from plain document retrieval to structured graph traversal introduces new, under-explored privacy risks. This paper investigates the data extraction vulnerabilities of the Graph RAG systems. We design and execute tailored data extraction attacks to probe their susceptibility to leaking both raw text and structured data, such as entities and their relationships. Our findings reveal a critical trade-off: while Graph RAG systems may reduce raw text leakage, they are significantly more vulnerable to the extraction of structured entity and relationship information. We also explore potential defense mechanisms to mitigate these novel attack surfaces. This work provides a foundational analysis of the unique privacy challenges in Graph RAG and offers insights for building more secure systems.

2025

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) is a practical yet challenging task, which is to ask questions based on documents while referring to multiple pages and different modalities of information, e.g., images and tables. To handle multi-modality, recent methods follow a similar Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, but utilize Visual Language Models (VLMs) based embedding model to embed and retrieve relevant pages as images, and generate answers with VLMs that can accept an image as input. In this paper, we introduce SimpleDoc, a lightweight yet powerful retrieval - augmented framework for DocVQA. It boosts evidence page gathering by first retrieving candidates through embedding similarity and then filtering and re-ranking these candidates based on page summaries. A single VLM-based reasoner agent repeatedly invokes this dual-cue retriever, iteratively pulling fresh pages into a working memory until the question is confidently answered. SimpleDoc outperforms previous baselines by 3.2% on average on 4 DocVQA datasets with much fewer pages retrieved. Our code is available at https://github.com/ag2ai/SimpleDoc.
LLM-based optimization has shown remarkable potential in improving agentic systems. However, the conventional approach of prompting LLM-based generative optimizer with the trajectories on the whole training dataset in a single pass becomes untenable as datasets grow, leading to context window overflow and degraded pattern recognition. To address these challenges, we propose Fine-grained Generative Optimization (FGO), a scalable framework that divides large optimization tasks into manageable subsets, performs targeted optimizations, and systematically combines optimized components through progressive merging.Evaluation across ALFWorld, LogisticsQA, and GAIA benchmarks demonstrates that FGO outperforms conventional approach by 1.6-8.6% while reducing average prompt token consumption by 56.3%. Our framework provides a practical solution for scaling up LLM-based generative optimization of increasingly sophisticated agentic systems. Further analysis demonstrates that FGO achieves the most consistent performance gain in all training dataset sizes, showcasing its scalability and efficiency.