Jing Shao
Publications
A Unified Framework for the Evaluation of LLM Agentic Capabilities
As LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents, reliable assessment of their agentic capabilities has become essential. However, reported benchmark scores often jointly reflect model capability and the implementation choices each benchmark is packaged with, making cross-benchmark results difficult to interpret as clean measurements of the underlying model. In this work, we present a unified framework for the fair evaluation of LLM agentic capabilities. Driven by a unified configuration system, the framework integrates diverse benchmarks into a standardized instruction--tool--environment format, executes agents through a fixed ReAct-style architecture within a controllable sandbox, and provides an optional offline setting that replaces volatile live environments with curated snapshots, so that framework effects and environment effects can be analyzed separately. Building on this, we unify the evaluation methodology under each benchmark's original task-success criteria, while introducing unified metrics for resource consumption and a taxonomy for decision- and execution-level failure attribution. Within this framework, we adapt 7 widely used benchmarks spanning 24 domains across single-agent, multi-agent, and safety-critical scenarios, and conduct a large-scale empirical analysis over 400K rollouts and 5B tokens on 15 models. The results show that scaffold choice and environmental volatility materially shift benchmark outcomes in both directions, allowing our framework to disentangle intrinsic LLM capabilities from framework- and environment-induced artifacts. We further demonstrate its extensibility as a secure testbed for safety-critical domains. Codes and benchmarks at are available at https://github.com/whfeLingYu/A-Unified-Framework-for-the-Evaluation-of-LLM-Agentic-Capabilities, https://huggingface.co/AgentFramework/Unified_Farmework.
SEARL: Joint Optimization of Policy and Tool Graph Memory for Self-Evolving Agents
Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have demonstrated significant potential in single-turn reasoning tasks. With the paradigm shift toward self-evolving agentic learning, models are increasingly expected to learn from trajectories by synthesizing tools or accumulating explicit experiences. However, prevailing methods typically rely on large-scale LLMs or multi-agent frameworks, which hinder their deployment in resource-constrained environments. The inherent sparsity of outcome-based rewards also poses a substantial challenge, as agents typically receive feedback only upon completion of tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce a Tool-Memory based self-evolving agentic framework SEARL. Unlike approaches that directly utilize interaction experiences, our method constructs a structured experience memory that integrates planning with execution. This provides a novel state abstraction that facilitates generalization across analogous contexts, such as tool reuse. Consequently, agents extract explicit knowledge from historical data while leveraging inter-trajectory correlations to densify reward signals. We evaluate our framework on knowledge reasoning and mathematics tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving more practical and efficient learning.
Seeing with You: Perception-Reasoning Coevolution for Multimodal Reasoning
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially enhanced the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing RLVR approaches typically rely on outcome-driven optimization that updates both perception and reasoning using a shared reward based solely on the final answer. This shared reward blurs credit assignment, frequently improving reasoning patterns while failing to reliably enhance the accuracy of upstream visual evidence extraction. To address this perception bottleneck, we introduce PRCO (Perception-Reasoning Coevolution), a dual-role RLVR framework with a shared policy. PRCO consists of two cooperative roles: an Observer that generates an evidence caption tailored to the question and a Solver that predicts the final answer based on this caption. Crucially, PRCO employs role-specific reward signals: the Solver is optimized using verifiable outcome rewards on the final answer, while the Observer receives a utility reward derived from the Solver's downstream success. Extensive experiments across eight challenging multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that PRCO yields consistent improvements across model scales by over 7 points on average accuracy compared to the base model, outperforming prior open-source RL-tuned baselines.