Tao Yuan
2026
MemoPhishAgent: Memory-Augmented Multi-Modal LLM Agent for Phishing URL Detection
Xuan Chen | Hao Liu | Tao Yuan | Mehran Kafai | Piotr Habas | Xiangyu Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Xuan Chen | Hao Liu | Tao Yuan | Mehran Kafai | Piotr Habas | Xiangyu Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Traditional phishing website detection relies on static heuristics or reference lists, which lag behind rapidly evolving attacks. While recent systems incorporate large language models (LLMs), they are still prompt-based, deterministic pipelines that underutilize reasoning capability.We present MemoPhishAgent (MPA), a memory-augmented multi-modal LLM agent that dynamically orchestrates phishing-specific tools and leverages episodic memories of past reasoning trajectories to guide decisions on recurring and novel threats.On two public datasets, MPA outperforms three state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, improving recall by 13.6%.To better reflect realistic, user-facing phishing detection performance, we further evaluate MPA on a benchmark of real-world suspicious URLs actively crawled from five social media platforms, where it improves recall by 20%.Detailed analysis shows episodic memory contributes up to 27% recall gain without introducing additional computational overhead.The ablation study confirms the necessity of the agent-based approach compared to prompt-based baselines and validates the effectiveness of our tool design.Finally, MPA is deployed in production, processing ∼60K targeted high-risk URLs weekly, and achieving 91.44% recall, providing proactive protection for millions of customers.Together, our results show that combining multi-modal reasoning with episodic memory yields robust, adaptable phishing detection in realistic user-exposure settings.Our implementation is available at https://github.com/XuanChen-xc/MemoPhishAgent.git.
2020
Structured Attention for Unsupervised Dialogue Structure Induction
Liang Qiu | Yizhou Zhao | Weiyan Shi | Yuan Liang | Feng Shi | Tao Yuan | Zhou Yu | Song-Chun Zhu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Liang Qiu | Yizhou Zhao | Weiyan Shi | Yuan Liang | Feng Shi | Tao Yuan | Zhou Yu | Song-Chun Zhu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Inducing a meaningful structural representation from one or a set of dialogues is a crucial but challenging task in computational linguistics. Advancement made in this area is critical for dialogue system design and discourse analysis. It can also be extended to solve grammatical inference. In this work, we propose to incorporate structured attention layers into a Variational Recurrent Neural Network (VRNN) model with discrete latent states to learn dialogue structure in an unsupervised fashion. Compared to a vanilla VRNN, structured attention enables a model to focus on different parts of the source sentence embeddings while enforcing a structural inductive bias. Experiments show that on two-party dialogue datasets, VRNN with structured attention learns semantic structures that are similar to templates used to generate this dialogue corpus. While on multi-party dialogue datasets, our model learns an interactive structure demonstrating its capability of distinguishing speakers or addresses, automatically disentangling dialogues without explicit human annotation.