Boyang Li
Publications
Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision
Existing benchmarks for Deep Research Agents (DRAs) treat report generation as a single-shot writing task, which fundamentally diverges from how human researchers iteratively draft and revise reports via self-reflection or peer feedback. Whether DRAs can reliably revise reports with user feedback remains unexplored. We introduce Mr Dre, an evaluation suite that establishes multi-turn report revision as a new evaluation axis for DRAs. Mr Dre consists of (1) a unified long-form report evaluation protocol spanning comprehensiveness, factuality, and presentation, and (2) a human-verified feedback simulation pipeline for multi-turn revision. Our analysis of five diverse DRAs reveals a critical limitation: while agents can address most user feedback, they also regress on 16-27% of previously covered content and citation quality. Over multiple revision turns, even the best-performing agents leave significant headroom, as they continue to disrupt content outside the feedback's scope and fail to preserve earlier edits. We further show that these issues are not easily resolvable through inference-time fixes such as prompt engineering and a dedicated sub-agent for report revision.
Tone Matters: The Impact of Linguistic Tone on Hallucination in VLMs
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used in safety-critical applications that require reliable visual grounding. However, these models often hallucinate details that are not present in the image to satisfy user prompts. While recent datasets and benchmarks have been introduced to evaluate systematic hallucinations in VLMs, many hallucination behaviors remain insufficiently characterized. In particular, prior work primarily focuses on object presence or absence, leaving it unclear how prompt phrasing and structural constraints can systematically induce hallucinations. In this paper, we investigate how different forms of prompt pressure influence hallucination behavior. We introduce Ghost-100, a procedurally generated dataset of synthetic scenes in which key visual details are deliberately removed, enabling controlled analysis of absence-based hallucinations. Using a structured 5-Level Prompt Intensity Framework, we vary prompts from neutral queries to toxic demands and rigid formatting constraints. We evaluate three representative open-weight VLMs: MiniCPM-V 2.6-8B, Qwen2-VL-7B, and Qwen3-VL-8B. Across all three models, hallucination rates do not increase monotonically with prompt intensity. All models exhibit reductions at higher intensity levels at different thresholds, though not all show sustained reduction under maximum coercion. These results suggest that current safety alignment is more effective at detecting semantic hostility than structural coercion, revealing model-specific limitations in handling compliance pressure. Our dataset is available at: https://github.com/bli1/tone-matters