Minghao Liu
Publications
CLI-Universe: Towards Verifiable Task Synthesis Engine for Terminal Agents
While recent LLM-based terminal agents have demonstrated promising capabilities, the scarcity of high-quality, executable training data remains a critical bottleneck. Existing synthesis pipelines typically scale by retrofitting surface-level artifacts into tasks, frequently yielding ambiguous instructions, shallow execution paths, and brittle tests that provide weak learning signals. To overcome this, we introduce CLI-Universe, a principled synthesis engine that constructs terminal-agent tasks. CLI-Universe generates candidate tasks by sampling combinations across a multi-dimensional capability taxonomy (domain, skill type, capability, and engineering pillar), then grounds each candidate through evidence-guided deep research over real-world technical materials. To ensure rigorous supervision, validated blueprints are instantiated into Dockerized environments and subjected to a multi-stage executable verification pipeline featuring rubric-gated test construction, hint-conditional filtering, and strict fail-to-pass checking. Across the full pipeline, from candidate generation to verification, approximately two-thirds of candidates are discarded, retaining only those that are genuine, verifiable, and non-trivially challenging. To validate our framework, we instantiate a highly distilled dataset of 6,000 trajectories called CLI-Universe-6K. Remarkably, fine-tuning Qwen3-32B on CLI-Universe-6K achieves 33.4% on Terminal-Bench 2.0. This sets a new state-of-the-art for models trained on open-source data at or below 32B parameters, and outperforms several models an order of magnitude larger, demonstrating the profound data efficiency of structured, high-fidelity synthesis.
WebCompass: Towards Multimodal Web Coding Evaluation for Code Language Models
Large language models are rapidly evolving into interactive coding agents capable of end-to-end web coding, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only narrow slices of this capability, typically text-conditioned generation with static-correctness metrics, leaving visual fidelity, interaction quality, and codebase-level reasoning largely unmeasured. We introduce WebCompass, a multimodal benchmark that provides unified lifecycle evaluation of web engineering capability. Recognizing that real-world web coding is an iterative cycle of generation, editing, and repair, WebCompass spans three input modalities (text, image, video) and three task types (generation, editing, repair), yielding seven task categories that mirror professional workflows. Through a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop pipeline, we curate instances covering 15 generation domains, 16 editing operation types, and 11 repair defect types, each annotated at Easy/Medium/Hard levels. For evaluation, we adopt a checklist-guided LLM-as-a-Judge protocol for editing and repair, and propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge paradigm for generation that autonomously executes generated websites in a real browser, explores interactive behaviors via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and iteratively synthesizes targeted test cases, closely approximating human acceptance testing. We evaluate representative closed-source and open-source models and observe that: (1) closed-source models remain substantially stronger and more balanced; (2) editing and repair exhibit distinct difficulty profiles, with repair preserving interactivity better but remaining execution-challenging; (3) aesthetics is the most persistent bottleneck, especially for open-source models; and (4) framework choice materially affects outcomes, with Vue consistently challenging while React and Vanilla/HTML perform more strongly depending on task type.
Justified or Just Convincing? Error Verifiability as a Dimension of LLM Quality
As LLMs are deployed in high-stakes settings, users must judge the correctness of individual responses, often relying on model-generated justifications such as reasoning chains or explanations. Yet, no standard measure exists for whether these justifications help users distinguish correct answers from incorrect ones. We formalize this idea as error verifiability and propose $v_{\text{bal}}$, a balanced metric that measures whether justifications enable raters to accurately assess answer correctness, validated against human raters who show high agreement. We find that neither common approaches, such as post-training and model scaling, nor more targeted interventions recommended improve verifiability. We introduce two methods that succeed at improving verifiability: reflect-and-rephrase (RR) for mathematical reasoning and oracle-rephrase (OR) for factual QA, both of which improve verifiability by incorporating domain-appropriate external information. Together, our results establish error verifiability as a distinct dimension of response quality that does not emerge from accuracy improvements alone and requires dedicated, domain-aware methods to address.