Ziheng Zhou
Publications
Can Current Agents Close the Discovery-to-Application Gap? A Case Study in Minecraft
Discovering causal regularities and applying them to build functional systems--the discovery-to-application loop--is a hallmark of general intelligence, yet evaluating this capacity has been hindered by the vast complexity gap between scientific discovery and real-world engineering. We introduce SciCrafter, a Minecraft-based benchmark that operationalizes this loop through parameterized redstone circuit tasks. Agents must ignite lamps in specified patterns (e.g., simultaneously or in timed sequences); scaling target parameters substantially increases construction complexity and required knowledge, forcing genuine discovery rather than reliance on memorized solutions. Evaluating frontier models including GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Pro, and Claude-Opus-4.5 under a general-purpose code agent scaffold, we find that all plateau at approximately 26% success rate. To diagnose these failures, we decompose the loop into four capacities--knowledge gap identification, experimental discovery, knowledge consolidation, and knowledge application--and design targeted interventions whose marginal contributions serve as proxies for corresponding gaps. Our analysis reveals that although the general knowledge application capability still remains as the biggest gap across all models, for frontier models the knowledge gap identification starts to become a major hurdle--indicating the bottleneck is shifting from solving problems right to raising the right problems for current AI. We release SciCrafter as a diagnostic probe for future research on AI systems that navigate the full discovery-to-application loop.
Credibility Governance: A Social Mechanism for Collective Self-Correction under Weak Truth Signals
Online platforms increasingly rely on opinion aggregation to allocate real-world attention and resources, yet common signals such as engagement votes or capital-weighted commitments are easy to amplify and often track visibility rather than reliability. This makes collective judgments brittle under weak truth signals, noisy or delayed feedback, early popularity surges, and strategic manipulation. We propose Credibility Governance (CG), a mechanism that reallocates influence by learning which agents and viewpoints consistently track evolving public evidence. CG maintains dynamic credibility scores for both agents and opinions, updates opinion influence via credibility-weighted endorsements, and updates agent credibility based on the long-run performance of the opinions they support, rewarding early and persistent alignment with emerging evidence while filtering short-lived noise. We evaluate CG in POLIS, a socio-physical simulation environment that models coupled belief dynamics and downstream feedback under uncertainty. Across settings with initial majority misalignment, observation noise and contamination, and misinformation shocks, CG outperforms vote-based, stake-weighted, and no-governance baselines, yielding faster recovery to the true state, reduced lock-in and path dependence, and improved robustness under adversarial pressure. Our implementation and experimental scripts are publicly available at https://github.com/Wanying-He/Credibility_Governance.
Simple Role Assignment is Extraordinarily Effective for Safety Alignment
Principle-based alignment often lacks context sensitivity and completeness. Grounded in Theory of Mind, we propose role conditioning as a compact alternative: social roles (e.g., mother, judge) implicitly encode both values and the cognitive schemas required to apply them. We introduce a training-free pipeline featuring a role-conditioned generator and iterative role-based critics for refinement. Across five model families, our approach consistently outperforms principle-based, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and other baselines across benchmarks. Notably, it reduces unsafe outputs on the WildJailbreak benchmark from 81.4\% to 3.6\% with DeepSeek-V3. Not only for common safety benchmarks, it consistently applies for agentic safety tasks. These results establish role assignment as a powerful, interpretable paradigm for AI alignment and LLM-as-a-Judge construction.