Yi Xu
Publications
SemaClaw: A Step Towards General-Purpose Personal AI Agents through Harness Engineering
The rise of OpenClaw in early 2026 marks the moment when millions of users began deploying personal AI agents into their daily lives, delegating tasks ranging from travel planning to multi-step research. This scale of adoption signals that two parallel arcs of development have reached an inflection point. First is a paradigm shift in AI engineering, evolving from prompt and context engineering to harness engineering-designing the complete infrastructure necessary to transform unconstrained agents into controllable, auditable, and production-reliable systems. As model capabilities converge, this harness layer is becoming the primary site of architectural differentiation. Second is the evolution of human-agent interaction from discrete tasks toward a persistent, contextually aware collaborative relationship, which demands open, trustworthy and extensible harness infrastructure. We present SemaClaw, an open-source multi-agent application framework that addresses these shifts by taking a step towards general-purpose personal AI agents through harness engineering. Our primary contributions include a DAG-based two-phase hybrid agent team orchestration method, a PermissionBridge behavioral safety system, a three-tier context management architecture, and an agentic wiki skill for automated personal knowledge base construction.
Trust Your Memory: Verifiable Control of Smart Homes through Reinforcement Learning with Multi-dimensional Rewards
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a key foundation for enabling personalized smart home experiences. While existing studies have explored how smart home assistants understand user queries to control devices in real time, their ability to perform memory-driven device control remains challenging from both evaluation and methodological perspectives. In terms of evaluation, existing benchmarks either focus on immediate device control or general open-domain memory retrieval tasks, and therefore cannot effectively evaluate a model's ability to perform memory-driven device control. Methodologically, while memory-driven device control can be approached using Reinforcement Learning, conventional RL methods generally rely on outcome-based supervision (i.e., whether the final task is achieved). This lack of intermediate feedback can lead to sub-optimal performance or local failures in fine-grained memory management tasks (adding, updating, deleting, and utilizing). To address these issues, we first release MemHomeLife, built from anonymized real-world long-term user interaction logs. To enable more fine-grained evaluation of different memory-related subtasks, we further construct MemHome, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate memory-driven device control in smart home scenarios.
ECHO: Efficient Chest X-ray Report Generation with One-step Block Diffusion
Chest X-ray report generation (CXR-RG) has the potential to substantially alleviate radiologists' workload. However, conventional autoregressive vision--language models (VLMs) suffer from high inference latency due to sequential token decoding. Diffusion-based models offer a promising alternative through parallel generation, but they still require multiple denoising iterations. Compressing multi-step denoising to a single step could further reduce latency, but often degrades textual coherence due to the mean-field bias introduced by token-factorized denoisers. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{ECHO}, an efficient diffusion-based VLM (dVLM) for chest X-ray report generation. ECHO enables stable one-step-per-block inference via a novel Direct Conditional Distillation (DCD) framework, which mitigates the mean-field limitation by constructing unfactorized supervision from on-policy diffusion trajectories to encode joint token dependencies. In addition, we introduce a Response-Asymmetric Diffusion (RAD) training strategy that further improves training efficiency while maintaining model effectiveness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ECHO surpasses state-of-the-art autoregressive methods, improving RaTE and SemScore by \textbf{64.33\%} and \textbf{60.58\%} respectively, while achieving an \textbf{$8\times$} inference speedup without compromising clinical accuracy.
Retrieval-Augmented Self-Taught Reasoning Model with Adaptive Chain-of-Thought for ASR Named Entity Correction
End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems frequently misrecognize domain-specific phrases like named entities, which can cause catastrophic failures in downstream tasks. A new family of named entity correction methods based on large language models (LLMs) has recently emerged. However, these approaches have yet to fully exploit the sophisticated reasoning capabilities inherent to LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented generation framework for correcting named entity errors in ASR. Our approach consists of two key components: (1) a rephrasing language model (RLM) for named entity recognition, followed by candidate retrieval using a phonetic-level edit distance; and (2) a novel self-taught reasoning model with adaptive chain-of-thought (A-STAR) that dynamically adjusts the depth of its reasoning based on task difficulty. Experiments on the AISHELL-1 and Homophone datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves relative reductions in the named entity character error rate of 17.96\% and 34.42\%, respectively, compared to a strong baseline.