Siwei Han
2026
SynthAgent: Adapting Web Agents with Synthetic Supervision
Zhaoyang Wang | Yiming Liang | Xuchao Zhang | Qianhui Wu | Siwei Han | Anson Bastos | Rujia Wang | Chetan Bansal | Baolin Peng | Jianfeng Gao | Saravan Rajmohan | Huaxiu Yao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhaoyang Wang | Yiming Liang | Xuchao Zhang | Qianhui Wu | Siwei Han | Anson Bastos | Rujia Wang | Chetan Bansal | Baolin Peng | Jianfeng Gao | Saravan Rajmohan | Huaxiu Yao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Web agents struggle to adapt to new websites due to the scarcity of environment specific tasks and demonstrations. Recent works have explored synthetic data generation to address this challenge, however, they suffer from data quality issues where synthesized tasks contain hallucinations that cannot be executed, and collected trajectories are noisy with redundant or misaligned actions. In this paper, we propose SynthAgent, a fully synthetic supervision framework that aims at improving synthetic data quality via dual refinement of both tasks and trajectories. Our approach begins by synthesizing diverse tasks through categorized exploration of web elements, ensuring efficient coverage of the target environment. During trajectory collection, tasks are refined only when conflicts with observations are detected, which mitigates hallucinations while preserving task consistency. After collection, we conduct trajectory refinement with global context to mitigate potential noise or misalignments. Finally, we fine-tune open-source web agents on the refined synthetic data to adapt them to the target environment. Experimental results demonstrate that SynthAgent outperforms existing synthetic data methods, validating the importance of high-quality synthetic supervision. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SynthAgent.
SimpleOCR: Rendering Visual Questions to Teach MLLMs to Read
Yibo Peng | Peng Xia | Ding Zhong | Kaide Zeng | Siwei Han | Yiyang Zhou | Jiaqi Liu | Ruiyi Zhang | Huaxiu Yao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yibo Peng | Peng Xia | Ding Zhong | Kaide Zeng | Siwei Han | Yiyang Zhou | Jiaqi Liu | Ruiyi Zhang | Huaxiu Yao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Despite the rapid advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), a critical question regarding their visual grounding mechanism remains unanswered: do these models genuinely read text embedded in images, or do they merely rely on parametric shortcuts in the text prompt? In this work, we diagnose this issue by introducing the Visualized-Question (VQ) setting, where text queries are rendered directly onto images to structurally mandate visual engagement. Our diagnostic experiments on Qwen2.5-VL reveal a startling capability-utilization gap: despite possessing strong OCR capabilities, models suffer a performance degradation of up to 12.7% in the VQ setting, exposing a deep-seated modality laziness. To bridge this gap, we propose SimpleOCR, a plug-and-play training strategy that imposes a structural constraint on the learning process. By transforming training samples into the VQ format with randomized styles, SimpleOCR effectively invalidates text-based shortcuts, compelling the model to activate and optimize its visual text extraction pathways. Empirically, SimpleOCR yields robust gains without architectural modifications. On four representative OOD benchmarks, it surpasses the base model by 5.4% and GRPO based on original images by 2.7%, while exhibiting extreme data efficiency, achieving superior performance with 30x fewer samples (8.5K) than recent RL-based methods. Furthermore, its plug-and-play nature allows seamless integration with advanced RL strategies like NoisyRollout to yield complementary improvements. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/SimpleOCR.
2025
GLIMPSE: Do Large Vision-Language Models Truly Think With Videos or Just Glimpse at Them?
Yiyang Zhou | Linjie Li | Shi Qiu | Zhengyuan Yang | Yuyang Zhao | Siwei Han | Yangfan He | Kangqi Li | Haonian Ji | Zihao Zhao | Haibo Tong | Lijuan Wang | Huaxiu Yao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yiyang Zhou | Linjie Li | Shi Qiu | Zhengyuan Yang | Yuyang Zhao | Siwei Han | Yangfan He | Kangqi Li | Haonian Ji | Zihao Zhao | Haibo Tong | Lijuan Wang | Huaxiu Yao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Existing video benchmarks often resemble image-based benchmarks, with question types like “What actions does the person perform throughout the video?” or “What color is the woman’s dress in the video?” For these, models can often answer by scanning just a few key frames, without deep temporal reasoning. This limits our ability to assess whether large vision-language models (LVLMs) can truly think with videos rather than perform superficial frame-level analysis. To address this, we introduce , a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate whether LVLMs can genuinely think with videos. Unlike prior benchmarks, emphasizes comprehensive video understanding beyond static image cues. It consists of 3,269 videos and over 4,342 highly visual-centric questions across 11 categories, including Trajectory Analysis, Temporal Reasoning, and Forensics Detection. All questions are carefully crafted by human annotators and require watching the entire video and reasoning over full video context—this is what we mean by thinking with video. These questions cannot be answered by scanning selected frames or relying on text alone. In human evaluations, achieves 94.82% accuracy, but current LVLMs face significant challenges. Even the best-performing model, GPT-o3, reaches only 66.43%, highlighting that LVLMs still struggle to move beyond surface-level reasoning to truly think with videos. We publicly release our benchmark and code at https://github.com/aiming-lab/GLIMPSE.