Sicheng Fan
Publications
WebChain: A Large-Scale Human-Annotated Dataset of Real-World Web Interaction Traces
We introduce WebChain, the largest open-source dataset of human-annotated trajectories on real-world websites, designed to accelerate reproducible research in web agents. It contains 31,725 trajectories and 318k steps, featuring a core Triple Alignment of visual, structural, and action data to provide rich, multi-modal supervision. The data is collected via a scalable pipeline that ensures coverage of complex, high-value tasks often missed by synthetic methods. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a Dual Mid-Training recipe that decouples spatial grounding from planning, achieving state-of-the-art performance on our proposed WebChainBench and other public GUI benchmarks. Our work provides the data and insights necessary to build and rigorously evaluate the next generation of scalable web agents.
WebFactory: Automated Compression of Foundational Language Intelligence into Grounded Web Agents
Current paradigms for training GUI agents are fundamentally limited by a reliance on either unsafe, non-reproducible live web interactions or costly, scarce human-crafted data and environments. We argue this focus on data volume overlooks a more critical factor: the efficiency of compressing a large language model's (LLM) latent knowledge into actionable agent behavior. We introduce WebFactory, a novel, fully automated closed-loop reinforcement learning pipeline for GUI agents, systematically compressing LLM-encoded internet intelligence into efficient, grounded actions. Our pipeline features a process of scalable environment synthesis, knowledge-aware task generation, LLM-powered trajectory collection, decomposed reward RL training, and systematic agent evaluation. Remarkably, our agent demonstrates exceptional data efficiency and generalization. Trained on synthetic data from only 10 websites within WebFactory, it achieves performance comparable to GUI agents trained on the same amount of human-annotated data from a much larger set of environments. This superior performance is consistent across our internal offline and online transfer benchmarks, where our agent also significantly outperforms the base foundation model. We further provide critical insights into the "embodiment potential" of different LLM foundations, offering a new axis for model evaluation. This work presents a scalable and cost-effective paradigm for transforming passive internet knowledge into active, grounded intelligence, marking a critical step towards general-purpose interactive agents.
Social-JEPA: Emergent Geometric Isomorphism
World models compress rich sensory streams into compact latent codes that anticipate future observations. We let separate agents acquire such models from distinct viewpoints of the same environment without any parameter sharing or coordination. After training, their internal representations exhibit a striking emergent property: the two latent spaces are related by an approximate linear isometry, enabling transparent translation between them. This geometric consensus survives large viewpoint shifts and scant overlap in raw pixels. Leveraging the learned alignment, a classifier trained on one agent can be ported to the other with no additional gradient steps, while distillation-like migration accelerates later learning and markedly reduces total compute. The findings reveal that predictive learning objectives impose strong regularities on representation geometry, suggesting a lightweight path to interoperability among decentralized vision systems. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Social-JEPA-5C57.
ASA: Training-Free Representation Engineering for Tool-Calling Agents
Adapting LLM agents to domain-specific tool calling remains notably brittle under evolving interfaces. Prompt and schema engineering is easy to deploy but often fragile under distribution shift and strict parsers, while continual parameter-efficient fine-tuning improves reliability at the cost of training, maintenance, and potential forgetting. We identify a critical Lazy Agent failure mode where tool necessity is nearly perfectly decodable from mid-layer activations, yet the model remains conservative in entering tool mode, revealing a representation-behavior gap. We propose Activation Steering Adapter (ASA), a training-free, inference-time controller that performs a single-shot mid-layer intervention and targets tool domains via a router-conditioned mixture of steering vectors with a probe-guided signed gate to amplify true intent while suppressing spurious triggers. On MTU-Bench with Qwen2.5-1.5B, ASA improves strict tool-use F1 from 0.18 to 0.50 while reducing the false positive rate from 0.15 to 0.05, using only about 20KB of portable assets and no weight updates.