Yuan Cao
Publications
GUI-GENESIS: Automated Synthesis of Efficient Environments with Verifiable Rewards for GUI Agent Post-Training
Post-training GUI agents in interactive environments is critical for developing generalization and long-horizon planning capabilities. However, training on real-world applications is hindered by high latency, poor reproducibility, and unverifiable rewards relying on noisy visual proxies. To address the limitations, we present GUI-GENESIS, the first framework to automatically synthesize efficient GUI training environments with verifiable rewards. GUI-GENESIS reconstructs real-world applications into lightweight web environments using multimodal code models and equips them with code-native rewards, executable assertions that provide deterministic reward signals and eliminate visual estimation noise. Extensive experiments show that GUI-GENESIS reduces environment latency by 10 times and costs by over $28,000 per epoch compared to training on real applications. Notably, agents trained with GUI-GENESIS outperform the base model by 14.54% and even real-world RL baselines by 3.27% on held-out real-world tasks. Finally, we observe that models can synthesize environments they cannot yet solve, highlighting a pathway for self-improving agents.
Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety
Ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) adhere to safety principles without refusing benign requests remains a significant challenge. While OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance the safety of its o-series models through reasoning over detailed ``code-like'' safety rules, the effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs, which typically lack advanced reasoning capabilities, is understudied. In this work, we systematically evaluate the impact of explicitly specifying extensive safety codes versus demonstrating them through illustrative cases. We find that referencing explicit codes inconsistently improves harmlessness and systematically degrades helpfulness, whereas training on case-augmented simple codes yields more robust and generalized safety behaviors. By guiding LLMs with case-augmented reasoning instead of extensive code-like safety rules, we avoid rigid adherence to narrowly enumerated rules and enable broader adaptability. Building on these insights, we propose CADA, a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for LLMs utilizing reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains. CADA effectively enhances harmlessness, improves robustness against attacks, and reduces over-refusal while preserving utility across diverse benchmarks, offering a practical alternative to rule-only DA for improving safety while maintaining helpfulness.